Trip to Adelaide to visit the set of The Rover:

THE WALK

by Thomas Hardy

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And so I went alone, and I did not mind

Not thinking of you as left behind.

 

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way;

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Enjoying Pauline Kael reviews. Especially this final thought in her review of “Hud”. The review had criticised the filmmakers for perverting their own intention, being to make a film with a somewhat anti-capitalist message, by casting a too charismatic and lovable actor in the role of Hud, being Paul Newman, who is the character who embodies the capitalist values:

But the movie wouldn’t necessarily be a good movie if its moral message was dramatically sustained in the story and action and perhaps it isn’t necessarily a bad move if its moral message is not sustained in the story and action. By all formal theories, a work that is split cannot be a work of art, but leaving the validity of these principles aside, do they hold for lesser works – not works of art but works of commerce and craftsmanship, sometimes fused by artistry? Is a commercial piece of entertainment (which may or may not aspire to be, or pretend to be, a work of art) necessarily a poor one if its material is confused or duplicit, or reveals elements at variance with its stated theme, or shows the divided intention of the craftsmen who made it? My answer is no, that in some films the more ambivalence that comes through, the more the film may mean to us, the more fun it may be. The process by which an idea for a movie is turned into the product that reaches us is so involved, and so many compromises, cuts and changes may have taken place, so much hope and disgust and spoilage and waste may be embodied in it or mummified in it, that the tension in the product, so some sense of urgency still left in it, may be our only contact with the life in which the product was processed. Commercial products in which we do not sense or experience divided hopes and aims and ideas may be the dullest – ones in which everything alive was processed out, or perhaps ones that were never alive even at the beginning.