I always say it gets harder to summon the crazy and write this thing. It must be a function of time or experience. My waffling ability is in the trough again or there's simply a lack of input to balance the output. I would love to reel off another 'Carrot Man' or a treatise on invisible ink. Oh, invisible ink. There was something about invisible ink that I wanted to write about. I wonder what it was.
Invisible ink... the ultimate in secret communication as long as the spies don't know the paper isn't blank. It's an interesting and lateral method: Don't mess with the message but with the medium instead. Very interesting. Maybe it was devised by someone trapped in a horrendous heat wave as we are now here in Wales. Even though I'm too pale to go out in high summer sun in any case it is also ridiculously hot. Outsiders must think we are so soft here in Britain, not coping with either the cold of winter of the heat of summer, but please remember that our extremes are so far apart, and widening. I wonder if any other country has such extremes?
This blog seems to have become a ragtag compilation of bits and bobs, a rogue collection of things that have been surfing my mind as I feel a bit lonely and sorry for myself. I don't know if was harder before I had a girlfriend and was ignorant or after and knew what I was missing. I suspect the earlier situation was better, as the phenomenon of a housemate taking two years to get to know me past my terrible first impression is very unlikely to repeat itself. In fact it verges on totally impossible that I'll ever have another housemate or flatmate for that long! Still, hope is not something to be given up, even in the throes of the most silly lonelinesses. And I've only gotten weirder with time.
Have you ever wondered how an orange actually develops. I have. Consider the lack of structure inside the fruit, and the apparent absence any kind of conduit. The segments are all sealed so how does the extra moisture get into them as they grow? And the pips just appear inside? It's all very suspicious, although I think I have a working theory for the pips at least, and the mechanism of the growing orange could be a very interesting model mathematically...
As an eclectic 'fruit salad' blog that wasn't so bad, but I hope to have an inspiration for next time. Or a huge fruity pineapple slice of story. I love pineapple. There has to be a branch of lunacy based around pineapples.
O.
Sunday, 14 July 2013
Friday, 12 July 2013
Giving a Talk
Rule one of being unemployed is to keep working. Rule two is to look for jobs. Rule three is not to write on the walls. All the other rules are about chocolate moose and are best left unstated. It's a strange time, especially when you're half-set for a job in September that you MIGHT get but can't be certain about for a while. It's like floating on a little cloud halfway between Wile E Coyote and the ground he's hurtling toward, and as he falls you're slowly... drifting... to an uncertain fate. Oh, Wile E Coyote, you're a rare one for physical comedy.
So what do you do in the interim period? You apply for jobs, work on regardless, and think about the odder parts of the profession that's chosen you, almost by default it seems. What you don't do is drift into a reverie on the bizarre experience that is giving a talk. I think some people like giving talks, but I am not of that persuasion despite it being a fundamental part of an academic researcher's career. For me, it's a magnificently scary experience, and it goes something like this:
1> Someone suggests you give a talk.
2> You think about briefly and agree.
3> Hey no stress, it's still weeks away.
4> Make a little plan on a piece of paper divided up into squares for each slide.
5> Realise you actually have to do some work to fill the slides.
6> Panic a little!
7> Go through a few weeks of escalating stress and preparation.
8> Reach the day of the talk.
9> Forget to practice what you're actually going to say.
10> Make some light notes on what to say.
11> Enter bunny-in-the-headlights mode for talk.
12> Give talk.
13> Answer questions in a haze.
14> Stumble to chair and collapse.
15> Lose memory of the whole talk-giving experience.
16> Sleep.
17> Return to step 1.
It really shouldn't be that scary an experience, but it is. You can tell, as well, because I talk so quickly that I can in finish in as little as half the time I was supposed to take! And I might start talking about donkeys in minarets, great satellite based custard-bombs, the loss of triangles as a design staple in the world, the proper usage of plain chocolate digestive biscuits as construction materials and, if I'm still running, a treatise on the correct way to structure a movie script. Oh, films, you can be so terrible. When will people learn to make it feel like the story was going before the film starts and will continue long after the film is over. That's how you establish a reality, not by artificial beginnings and endings, people! It's all about continuity!
O.
So what do you do in the interim period? You apply for jobs, work on regardless, and think about the odder parts of the profession that's chosen you, almost by default it seems. What you don't do is drift into a reverie on the bizarre experience that is giving a talk. I think some people like giving talks, but I am not of that persuasion despite it being a fundamental part of an academic researcher's career. For me, it's a magnificently scary experience, and it goes something like this:
1> Someone suggests you give a talk.
2> You think about briefly and agree.
3> Hey no stress, it's still weeks away.
4> Make a little plan on a piece of paper divided up into squares for each slide.
5> Realise you actually have to do some work to fill the slides.
6> Panic a little!
7> Go through a few weeks of escalating stress and preparation.
8> Reach the day of the talk.
9> Forget to practice what you're actually going to say.
10> Make some light notes on what to say.
11> Enter bunny-in-the-headlights mode for talk.
12> Give talk.
13> Answer questions in a haze.
14> Stumble to chair and collapse.
15> Lose memory of the whole talk-giving experience.
16> Sleep.
17> Return to step 1.
It really shouldn't be that scary an experience, but it is. You can tell, as well, because I talk so quickly that I can in finish in as little as half the time I was supposed to take! And I might start talking about donkeys in minarets, great satellite based custard-bombs, the loss of triangles as a design staple in the world, the proper usage of plain chocolate digestive biscuits as construction materials and, if I'm still running, a treatise on the correct way to structure a movie script. Oh, films, you can be so terrible. When will people learn to make it feel like the story was going before the film starts and will continue long after the film is over. That's how you establish a reality, not by artificial beginnings and endings, people! It's all about continuity!
O.
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Story: Oneiromancy, O
(Part I)
Oneiromancy: Divination by means of dreams
Can you tell the future from dreams? Some people say you can, that the world of dreams is a medium through which we can escape the linearity of time. And through that medium thoughts and visions can shuttle back and forth and perhaps entire souls can fleet looking for their homes or being sent back to the great sorting house for some karmic justice in their next dwelling. Maybe visions are just information imparted by souls bouncing back along their timelines and touching themselves at earlier points? If that were true, then psychics and seers are truly people who can deliberately access this dreamline and send messages back and forth, investigating what it is they need to know 'after the fact'.
What would happen if this medium, this 'dreamline' were understood and captured by the blue sky researchers toiling away in their self-funded pursuits or operating under the secretive auspices of mysterious benefactors? What would happen to the people who would suddenly become useful when before they merely made ends meet or exploited their own talents mercilessly? And what would happen to the frauds who claim to do it all but really just guess and waffle while looking for the inside line to financial success?
It seems impossible that anyone could control the passing of information through the dreamline, that any of this could be real. It seems unlikely that a message from the future, or the past, or even from a whole other present, could move through the intangible dimension of timeless to touch that one person who needs the information most. In most data passes through the dreamline, in fact in the vast and overwhelming majority of cases, the connection is missed and a lady in New Jersey will sit up straight in the bath and wonder what on Earth to with the bizarrely simple but mundanely incomprehensible Grand Unified Theory in her mind before getting back to washing her hair. Of the remaining connections that are successfully made, the cryptic coding of dreams themselves defeats the purpose. Still, what if that connection were made in one vital case, and a message made it through?
What if it did? Well, then it would be oneiromancy. And we'd have a whole new story to tell, wouldn't we?
Oneiromancy: Divination by means of dreams
Can you tell the future from dreams? Some people say you can, that the world of dreams is a medium through which we can escape the linearity of time. And through that medium thoughts and visions can shuttle back and forth and perhaps entire souls can fleet looking for their homes or being sent back to the great sorting house for some karmic justice in their next dwelling. Maybe visions are just information imparted by souls bouncing back along their timelines and touching themselves at earlier points? If that were true, then psychics and seers are truly people who can deliberately access this dreamline and send messages back and forth, investigating what it is they need to know 'after the fact'.
What would happen if this medium, this 'dreamline' were understood and captured by the blue sky researchers toiling away in their self-funded pursuits or operating under the secretive auspices of mysterious benefactors? What would happen to the people who would suddenly become useful when before they merely made ends meet or exploited their own talents mercilessly? And what would happen to the frauds who claim to do it all but really just guess and waffle while looking for the inside line to financial success?
It seems impossible that anyone could control the passing of information through the dreamline, that any of this could be real. It seems unlikely that a message from the future, or the past, or even from a whole other present, could move through the intangible dimension of timeless to touch that one person who needs the information most. In most data passes through the dreamline, in fact in the vast and overwhelming majority of cases, the connection is missed and a lady in New Jersey will sit up straight in the bath and wonder what on Earth to with the bizarrely simple but mundanely incomprehensible Grand Unified Theory in her mind before getting back to washing her hair. Of the remaining connections that are successfully made, the cryptic coding of dreams themselves defeats the purpose. Still, what if that connection were made in one vital case, and a message made it through?
What if it did? Well, then it would be oneiromancy. And we'd have a whole new story to tell, wouldn't we?
Monday, 8 July 2013
Reinvention is the Key
I'm finally making work progress again. It's not paid but it is working out. It's like a little summer present of long overdue competence. At least one thing is on the beginning line of real writing up. Madness!
So far in the Quirky Muffin I've talked a lot of nonsense, written stories, been meditative, stared moodily out the window, talked around things that really no-one wants to know and been quite bemused on many levels. What I haven't talked about is my work, something which no-one in their right mind would find interesting anyway. I have a PhD in Applied Mathematics and spend most of my research time applying continuum fluid mechanics models in thinly applicable approximations of physical problems.
What does that mean? Well, I have two principal projects which I'll try to explain. The first is my PhD and ongoing project, which is on approximating granular material moving through and being crushed by cone-type rock crushing machines. It turns out that there are models which approximate rocky granular assemblages as continua. After a year or reimplementing slip boundary conditions and redoing the whole of my thesis calculations it's now done and only the publication is left (publications are the equivalent to money and prestige in research).
Here in Aberystwyth I've been on a little short project on the modelling of foamy fluids flowing through constrictions, and how to visualise the results you get. And there has been progress - although it had to wait until after they stopped paying me! It's amazing what you can do once no-one is expecting you to do it any more, and as a result: Double progress! In this case we were and are assessing whether foams can be approximated via elastoviscoplastic continuum models.
On top of those two principal works there's even a third project on the back-burner and collecting dust. And that's on the modelling of blood flow in elastic walled arterial vessels and building mathematical occlusions and blockages to see what happens as the vessel gets closer to total disaster. That's exciting and is hampered by only one thing: If you solve a problem over a blood vessel, and the shape of the blood vessel is part of the thing you're finding, well that's difficult. And finally I want to model plants!
So, as time wanes on and the world shivers in its boots I'll be spending this hopefully short period of unemployment on my pet projects, keeping the Job Centre happy, tutoring a little and of course keeping the Quirky Muffin rolling along. It's reinvention time as I look sadly toward leaving Aberystwyth and hope fervently to return once again one day.
Reinvention is the key.
O.
So far in the Quirky Muffin I've talked a lot of nonsense, written stories, been meditative, stared moodily out the window, talked around things that really no-one wants to know and been quite bemused on many levels. What I haven't talked about is my work, something which no-one in their right mind would find interesting anyway. I have a PhD in Applied Mathematics and spend most of my research time applying continuum fluid mechanics models in thinly applicable approximations of physical problems.
What does that mean? Well, I have two principal projects which I'll try to explain. The first is my PhD and ongoing project, which is on approximating granular material moving through and being crushed by cone-type rock crushing machines. It turns out that there are models which approximate rocky granular assemblages as continua. After a year or reimplementing slip boundary conditions and redoing the whole of my thesis calculations it's now done and only the publication is left (publications are the equivalent to money and prestige in research).
Here in Aberystwyth I've been on a little short project on the modelling of foamy fluids flowing through constrictions, and how to visualise the results you get. And there has been progress - although it had to wait until after they stopped paying me! It's amazing what you can do once no-one is expecting you to do it any more, and as a result: Double progress! In this case we were and are assessing whether foams can be approximated via elastoviscoplastic continuum models.
On top of those two principal works there's even a third project on the back-burner and collecting dust. And that's on the modelling of blood flow in elastic walled arterial vessels and building mathematical occlusions and blockages to see what happens as the vessel gets closer to total disaster. That's exciting and is hampered by only one thing: If you solve a problem over a blood vessel, and the shape of the blood vessel is part of the thing you're finding, well that's difficult. And finally I want to model plants!
So, as time wanes on and the world shivers in its boots I'll be spending this hopefully short period of unemployment on my pet projects, keeping the Job Centre happy, tutoring a little and of course keeping the Quirky Muffin rolling along. It's reinvention time as I look sadly toward leaving Aberystwyth and hope fervently to return once again one day.
Reinvention is the key.
O.
Saturday, 6 July 2013
Story: The Disappearance (VI)
(Part V , VII)
Meeting yourself is one of the more bizarre things you can do. I say this with the sure experience of having done that same thing four times to date. This was the first time and counter-intuitively also the least shocking.
"Hi. How's it going?"
"Fine. Average day?"
"About usual."
We both paused.
"Want to spill on what's going on here, pal?"
"Time travel, doofus. I've come from the future. It's a crummy future and we want to change it. It's like that movie with the robot-thing."
"'Shakey Davies and The Robot Gladiator from far-off Future Fascist Rome, Part II'?"
"Always the quip, always the slam."
"Look, just spill the information."
"Fine. McGonagle Biscuits will implode into a dense chronal singularity in three days and we have to stop them. I'm from six days in the future, when three tenths of the nation has been sucked into the singularity and the rest is holding on by its fingertips. If we stop them I should stop existing. Well, I should have stopped existing already but here I am. Those rules are still just as fuzzy as all time travel tends to be."
"Super singularity? What about Agnes?" I looked at the stunning Agnes and was displeased suddenly at the idea of her being sucked into a singularity.
"She's sticking with me. I'll keep her out of trouble."
Agnes maintained a level silence. I had a feeling there were things being left unsaid. Probably things I would be extremely interested about. "I want to know where to start, I want to know how you got here, and I want to know why McGonagle here is keeping her lips clamped so tightly together."
Agnes finally broke down. "I'm not your Agnes. I'm future Agnes. All this happened because I withheld the truth from you when I met you the first time. Originally I would have met you here and filled your head with flirtatious nonsense and muddled your case, but now I've come back to tell you the truth about what's going on. The reality of it all. I didn't know myself to be honest. The Higher-Ups don't tell me everything. If you're curious then you'll find the first me gagged behind those chairs over there. And I haven't vanished either."
I dug out my old theoretical physics. "You guys have caused a separate timeline now, and you're trapped and persistent. If not then you would have evaporated as well. 'Temporal inertia' and 'bubbles on the surfaces of time' are just movie gibberish. Fantastic. Twin brothers after all this time, and mom never told me. The shame of that woman. You have to have worked this out already?" That last shot was pointed and pointed at my doppelganger.
He sighed. "If this were a novel, Agnes and I wouldn't live to the last page and would go out fighting the good fight."
"And..."
He knew what I was asking. "The singularity was caused by a time travel effect. McGonagle biscuits got sucked - will get sucked - into a collisional time vortex. It's all to do with time travel."
"We've inspected for weird equipment. There's nothing. I don't get it."
"There doesn't have to be anything there now, but in one hundred years there will be, and they use that technology in the most ridiculously stupid way, send future biscuits here to this time and to that factory, and the residual energy is what causes the anomalies. As it turns out, it's cheaper to make the stupid things after you've sold them. It's the scummiest reason to lose people in the bizarrest of ways."
Money! At least Agnes had enough conscience to look ashamed.
To be continued...
Meeting yourself is one of the more bizarre things you can do. I say this with the sure experience of having done that same thing four times to date. This was the first time and counter-intuitively also the least shocking.
"Hi. How's it going?"
"Fine. Average day?"
"About usual."
We both paused.
"Want to spill on what's going on here, pal?"
"Time travel, doofus. I've come from the future. It's a crummy future and we want to change it. It's like that movie with the robot-thing."
"'Shakey Davies and The Robot Gladiator from far-off Future Fascist Rome, Part II'?"
"Always the quip, always the slam."
"Look, just spill the information."
"Fine. McGonagle Biscuits will implode into a dense chronal singularity in three days and we have to stop them. I'm from six days in the future, when three tenths of the nation has been sucked into the singularity and the rest is holding on by its fingertips. If we stop them I should stop existing. Well, I should have stopped existing already but here I am. Those rules are still just as fuzzy as all time travel tends to be."
"Super singularity? What about Agnes?" I looked at the stunning Agnes and was displeased suddenly at the idea of her being sucked into a singularity.
"She's sticking with me. I'll keep her out of trouble."
Agnes maintained a level silence. I had a feeling there were things being left unsaid. Probably things I would be extremely interested about. "I want to know where to start, I want to know how you got here, and I want to know why McGonagle here is keeping her lips clamped so tightly together."
Agnes finally broke down. "I'm not your Agnes. I'm future Agnes. All this happened because I withheld the truth from you when I met you the first time. Originally I would have met you here and filled your head with flirtatious nonsense and muddled your case, but now I've come back to tell you the truth about what's going on. The reality of it all. I didn't know myself to be honest. The Higher-Ups don't tell me everything. If you're curious then you'll find the first me gagged behind those chairs over there. And I haven't vanished either."
I dug out my old theoretical physics. "You guys have caused a separate timeline now, and you're trapped and persistent. If not then you would have evaporated as well. 'Temporal inertia' and 'bubbles on the surfaces of time' are just movie gibberish. Fantastic. Twin brothers after all this time, and mom never told me. The shame of that woman. You have to have worked this out already?" That last shot was pointed and pointed at my doppelganger.
He sighed. "If this were a novel, Agnes and I wouldn't live to the last page and would go out fighting the good fight."
"And..."
He knew what I was asking. "The singularity was caused by a time travel effect. McGonagle biscuits got sucked - will get sucked - into a collisional time vortex. It's all to do with time travel."
"We've inspected for weird equipment. There's nothing. I don't get it."
"There doesn't have to be anything there now, but in one hundred years there will be, and they use that technology in the most ridiculously stupid way, send future biscuits here to this time and to that factory, and the residual energy is what causes the anomalies. As it turns out, it's cheaper to make the stupid things after you've sold them. It's the scummiest reason to lose people in the bizarrest of ways."
Money! At least Agnes had enough conscience to look ashamed.
To be continued...
Thursday, 4 July 2013
When is magic magic?
It's a rational world that we live in. Everything gets explained somehow and mysteries are assumed to have solutions we will eventually discover. As a scientist, I can understand that as a framework in which to do business, but at the same time it formalises mystery and the unknown into some discrete quality. It robs everything of magic.
What is magic? Drawing just on today, magic is standing by the sea and talking to oneself, or watching and listening to tonight's band in the Prom Bandstand. Magic is seeing a wave foam up to within a centimetre of your feet but not quite reaching, before swarming your position on the next attempt. Magic is an instantaneous quality, a throbbing in the fabric of space-time that can't be quantified. As a mathematician that should be anathema but really I quite like it.
The world of nature, of the environment at large, is large and chaotic and impossible to ever fully understand. That's what makes it special. Carrying on from our most distant intelligent ancestors we supernaturalise it, and enjoy it for the stories it conceals and the marvels it contains. It is not to be imagined that someone can walk down a beach and not have poetic or lyrical thoughts, or that the relaxation they seek will elude them. Or in a forest, or alongside a river, or on a grassy hillside.
For millennia people have been returning to nature in attempts to shed worldly concerns and for brief periods be meditative and happy. It's invaluable, and that deeply held attachment to nature, to the natural world, is something so primitive that it cannot help but be supernaturalised or spiritualised. It's sacred in the human sense not the more specific religious manner. We shed our worries at the door and go out to be happy.
So, what can we make of all this? For most of civilized history people have been drifting away from their roots, from the environment, and that dislocation has resulted in stresses and miseries, and hordes of diseases and malnutritions and things even worse. It would be impossible for us all to retreat to the country and walk around the woods and prowl the coastlines but we can make our day to day lives easier. It may sound stupid, but you can lean on that tree for a moment, or walk home along the river, or even lie down in the park at lunchtime.
You never know, you may find a piece of magic?
O.
What is magic? Drawing just on today, magic is standing by the sea and talking to oneself, or watching and listening to tonight's band in the Prom Bandstand. Magic is seeing a wave foam up to within a centimetre of your feet but not quite reaching, before swarming your position on the next attempt. Magic is an instantaneous quality, a throbbing in the fabric of space-time that can't be quantified. As a mathematician that should be anathema but really I quite like it.
The world of nature, of the environment at large, is large and chaotic and impossible to ever fully understand. That's what makes it special. Carrying on from our most distant intelligent ancestors we supernaturalise it, and enjoy it for the stories it conceals and the marvels it contains. It is not to be imagined that someone can walk down a beach and not have poetic or lyrical thoughts, or that the relaxation they seek will elude them. Or in a forest, or alongside a river, or on a grassy hillside.
For millennia people have been returning to nature in attempts to shed worldly concerns and for brief periods be meditative and happy. It's invaluable, and that deeply held attachment to nature, to the natural world, is something so primitive that it cannot help but be supernaturalised or spiritualised. It's sacred in the human sense not the more specific religious manner. We shed our worries at the door and go out to be happy.
So, what can we make of all this? For most of civilized history people have been drifting away from their roots, from the environment, and that dislocation has resulted in stresses and miseries, and hordes of diseases and malnutritions and things even worse. It would be impossible for us all to retreat to the country and walk around the woods and prowl the coastlines but we can make our day to day lives easier. It may sound stupid, but you can lean on that tree for a moment, or walk home along the river, or even lie down in the park at lunchtime.
You never know, you may find a piece of magic?
O.
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Movie: 'The Birdcage' (1996)
The worst prejudices are often your own, as they're the ones you should really be able to do something about. As part of Film Bin we've recently done a commentary for 'The Birdcage' and I have to admit that it was a big struggle to make myself watch it. I don't hate anyone or wish social groups ceased to exist, but I can be a little unsettled by effeminacy and sexuality in general and was just unwilling to put myself through it. I did watch it though, as new experiences and open minds are partly the purpose of Film Bin. Oddly I ended up being bored more than anything. Weird, isn't it? My prejudice could have been blocking me, but it didn't feel like there was someone to connect to in the movie for me personally.
So, against this reluctant backdrop I watched this movie and my main fears were unfounded as they normally are. Sure, I was a little put off by house-boy Agador and Nathan Lane but they weren't major problems at all. Actually I've skipped ahead a bit. Let's talk about the plot a little. Val (a boy, to ease name confusion) and Barbara are a young couple who want to get married. Barbara's dad is a super-conservative Republican senator (Gene Hackman) while Val's dad Armand (Robin Williams) owns a gay club in Miami and lives with his drag queen partner Albert (Nathan Lane). Val manipulates Armand into pretending to be non-gay when he meets Barbara's parents and therein lies the plot of the movie.
Technically the film is excellent, the casting is well done with every important role thought out and filled wonderfully. The excellence that is Gene Hackman feels wasted in a role that is underwritten. The sets and colours and costuming is all appealing and comparatively simple. Where I think that the movie falls apart is that it doesn't fall into being either a screwball comedy or a gushy Robin Williams movie. Williams is excellent in this film, held firmly in check, and driving every scene he's in with his huge manly moustache. I think the director may have had him in a virtual headlock the whole movie. It's also a little set-bound, which is fitting as it's a remake of a Franco-Italian movie that was itself an adaptation from a French play. Some more scenes could really have been moved outside, but perhaps they didn't have the budget? And finally the character Val is not particularly likeable so you never feel behind this plan of pretence that should power the film until the moral message at the end.
It's strange to not be able to connect to such a good movie. The performances are in the main excellent. Nathan Lane is wonderful as Albert and probably could not be bettered but the Hackman character is simply a caricature and never makes it to full depth, even after the final reveal of Val's parents. Perhaps it's okay to be a warm-hearted mildly funny movie with no message but I would have loved it to be screwball. Instead it does reach a level of farce in the closing half without ever reaching for the sky and is a bit muddled. I don't know what to make of it except that maybe I missed the point? Did the Senator overcome his prejudices or was he a jerk to his daughter and son-in-law thereafter? Did Val learn anything. Was there a consequence beyond that they did get married?
Ultimately I see where it's funny to other people and can see how good it is technically, so I say it's a good comedy drama that's just a bit too long and insufficiently motivated through the young couple being fairly unsympathetic.
Prejudices can be overcome, but it's hard if you don't you have them!
O.
So, against this reluctant backdrop I watched this movie and my main fears were unfounded as they normally are. Sure, I was a little put off by house-boy Agador and Nathan Lane but they weren't major problems at all. Actually I've skipped ahead a bit. Let's talk about the plot a little. Val (a boy, to ease name confusion) and Barbara are a young couple who want to get married. Barbara's dad is a super-conservative Republican senator (Gene Hackman) while Val's dad Armand (Robin Williams) owns a gay club in Miami and lives with his drag queen partner Albert (Nathan Lane). Val manipulates Armand into pretending to be non-gay when he meets Barbara's parents and therein lies the plot of the movie.
Technically the film is excellent, the casting is well done with every important role thought out and filled wonderfully. The excellence that is Gene Hackman feels wasted in a role that is underwritten. The sets and colours and costuming is all appealing and comparatively simple. Where I think that the movie falls apart is that it doesn't fall into being either a screwball comedy or a gushy Robin Williams movie. Williams is excellent in this film, held firmly in check, and driving every scene he's in with his huge manly moustache. I think the director may have had him in a virtual headlock the whole movie. It's also a little set-bound, which is fitting as it's a remake of a Franco-Italian movie that was itself an adaptation from a French play. Some more scenes could really have been moved outside, but perhaps they didn't have the budget? And finally the character Val is not particularly likeable so you never feel behind this plan of pretence that should power the film until the moral message at the end.
It's strange to not be able to connect to such a good movie. The performances are in the main excellent. Nathan Lane is wonderful as Albert and probably could not be bettered but the Hackman character is simply a caricature and never makes it to full depth, even after the final reveal of Val's parents. Perhaps it's okay to be a warm-hearted mildly funny movie with no message but I would have loved it to be screwball. Instead it does reach a level of farce in the closing half without ever reaching for the sky and is a bit muddled. I don't know what to make of it except that maybe I missed the point? Did the Senator overcome his prejudices or was he a jerk to his daughter and son-in-law thereafter? Did Val learn anything. Was there a consequence beyond that they did get married?
Ultimately I see where it's funny to other people and can see how good it is technically, so I say it's a good comedy drama that's just a bit too long and insufficiently motivated through the young couple being fairly unsympathetic.
Prejudices can be overcome, but it's hard if you don't you have them!
O.
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