A couple movies this weeks – flicks I saw on the ship. Coincidentally, both London-set, period pieces about the theatre. I haven’t had any time to get to the Guilt Pile of CDs lately, and it’s just gotten bigger in my absence.

Being Julia I remember Being Julia screening at the TIFF last year to considerable buzz, almost exclusively thanks to Annete Bening’s performance as Julia Lambert, an aging, mercurial 1930s stage actress going through a bit of a midlife crisis, taking a younger lover and fending off an ambitious ingenue rival. As it turns out the praise was well-deserved, as Bening dives right into the role, combining just the right balance of over-the-topness and vulnerability, by turns full-on diva and neurotically insecure. It all fits perfectly with her character, though, and never crosses the line into scenery-chewing. The supporting cast is also quite good, managing to hold their own even when Beining is “on”. I particularly liked seeing Jeremy Irons in a non-creepy role as Lambert’s cluelessly cuckolded husband. It’s a light, breezy period film that doesn’t overstay its welcome and has an excellent final act that really allows Bening to shine. It even took my mind off of being seasick at the time, no mean feat.

Finding Neverland Okay, at the risk of sounding like a total grump, I don’t understand the rapturous praise surrounding this film. It’s not BAD, but is so treacley and sentimental that it was a little embaressing to watch. It’s the I’ve-no-idea-how-accurate story of J.M. Barrie’s creation of the Peter Pan (a story for which I also have no great affection – just indifference), and the single mother whose brood who inspired him to write it. Johnny Depp is the playwright and Kate Winslett as the doomed-from-the-beginning matriarch. While I applaud his Scottish accent, I thought Depp was kind of vacant and came off as kind of overly naive, even for a daydreamer playwright, while the trio of moppets who play Winslett’s clan are almost unbearably precious. That actually goes for the whole film – too bloody precious. I liked Dustin Hoffman though. I don’t really like using that as a basis for criticism – it makes me feel like I’m saying there should have been car chases or ninjas or something to make it worthwhile. Not at all – I think I just dislike anything that makes such a blatant and clumsy grab for the heartstrings, because if it fails (as Finding Neverland did in my case), it’s just awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved. Now when I left the theatre, I saw people in the audience crying, but keep in mind that these were all senior citizens. Old people cry at everything.

np – American Music Club / A Toast To You

Someone asked what I had been listening to whilst on vacation – okay, I’ll bite. I only loaded up one CD wallet with 24 discs (trips are the only thing that make me wish for an iPod. Trips and moving houses). I’ve brought more on trips before but never ended up getting through a fraction of them so I kept it a little more economical this time. As it ended up, I went through most of them as reading and listening to music on the deck is how I spent most of our time at sea. No real surprises in the rotation – American Music Club, The Concretes, Crooked Fingers, Jens Lekman, My Morning Jacket, The National, The Radio Dept, Sigur Ros, Wilco, amongst others. Yeah, I actually just went through my CD wallet alphabetically.

And lots of Bob Dylan. In addition to the No Direction Home soundtrack, I picked up the September issue of Uncut in Helsinki which came with Highway 61 Revisited Revisited, a compilation disc with different artists covering te whole of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. The MP3 of the Drive-By Truckers doing “Like A Rolling Stone” has been kicking around but I was most keen on getting AMC’s “Queen Jane Approximately”. That track is actually a bit of a disappointment but on the whole the disc is enjoyable. Certainly makes me want to listen to the original, though.

The European media is in a bit of a Dylan tizzy themselves, what with the simultaneous release of the No Direction Home soundtrack and film, the softcover release of Chronicles, Volume 1 and The Bob Dylan Scrapbook. It was sheer luck that on the day I passed through Heathrow, The Independent ran a special Dylan section that compiled a number of excellent articles. I picked up a discarded copy in the departure lounge. For those of you not so fortunate as to be able to pick up other peoples’ refuse, they’ve got all the articles online:

Friday, September 23, 2:50 AM EDT, 8:50 AM local time

As I’ve always suspected, the so-called “continental breakfast” that North American hotesl are so generous with doesn’t actually exist on the continent. Our hotel in Copenhagen had a full and proper spread of eggs, bacon, bread, meats, cheeses, potatos… none of it was really very good mind you, but it’s certainly better than the danish, coffee and day-old USA Today that you get at your local Best Western. They had danishes, too, though I’m not sure if they’re still called danishes or not.

Trying to score free wifi in Copenhagen airport has proven futile. There are several networks around, but they’re either secure, expensive or otherwise inaccessible. Damn wireless teases. So I am sitting and waiting. We leave for London, Heathrow in about an hour and then it’s back across the Atlantic. Having Kroners to blow, I bought a copy of The Tears’ Here Come The Tears from the airport store. Not cheap, but about on par with what I’d have paid on import back home.

Friday, September 23, 6:39 AM EDT, 11:39 AM local time

Unlike last time, where we flew into London from the northwest in early morning, today we arrived from the east in midday on a clear, sunny day. This meant that I was able to get a good look at all of London in its glory as we flew almost parallel to the Thames. I’m pretty sure I saw London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, that gigantic ferris wheel thing (what’s the deal with that?). I know London is huge, but until you see it it’s hard to comprehend just HOW big it is. It doesn’t seem to end. Very cool.

And now it’s more waiting around in Heathrow’s departure lounge. I have to admit it’s nice to be back somewhere that I actually speak the language. Folks in Scandanavia were pretty good with the English, but the time in St Petersburg that I was trying to negotiate admission to a washroom with this little old Russian lady was an experience unto itself. She kept talking to me in Russian, I kept talking to her in English as though somehow either of us would suddenly and magically understand the other. Not going to happen. Eventually I just handed her a few US dollars and hoped I got fair change back in Rubles. Probably not, but at least I got to use the foulest port-a-let in western Russia.
(more…)

Contrary to what I’d been led to believe as a child, Denmark is NOT made entirely of Lego. Or Duplo.

And this Danish keyboard is fucking me up. I’m in a huge internet cafe in downtown Copenhagen, just across the street from the Tivoli Gardens amusement park. I’ve been wandering the city all day, and have taken in a goodly number of sights and sounds. We disembarked the ship early this morning and thanks to the most genial bus driver in the world, got to see a few things en route to the hotel. Though his job was simply to deposit us at the hotel straight from the ship, he made a photo stop detour for the Little Mermaid statue and even drove us back downtown from the hotel after we dropped our bags off, all while taking the scenic route. Very nice.

Just to recap my route – we started at the Royal Palace, took in the Marble Church just across the way and then the changing of the guard back at the palace. Then some lunch at the town square dealie by one of the canals. On the topic of canals – the travel literature for no less than three cities on my trip have made the claim of being the “Venice Of The North”. Stockholm has very little basis for that claim, and while Copenhagen is indeed very canal-friendly, I still have to give the title to St Petersburg. Now that’s a canal-riffic town. Anyway. After an extended stop by the town square, I hiked up to the Rosenborg Castle – very cool, with a moat and everything. And “Slottet” is my new favourite word. From there, it was a leisurely stroll down the pedestrian-only Kobmagergade and Stroget, the main shopping strip in Copenhagen. Just past there was Chrisiansborg, the seat of Danish Parliment, happily located on its very own island.

After that, it was a little more aimless wandering and killing time before dinner. As it is, bus driver dude isn’t picking us up till 8pm local time, so I still have a couple hours to while away people watching and just bumming around. It’s so refreshing to be on an internet connection that I’m not paying for in blood (you don’t want to know what my final online bill from the ship was – you really don’t) so I’ll probably just kick around online for a bit.

Once again, I am gobsmacked by another Scandanavian capital city. There are bike lanes everywhere, pedestrian malls, incredible architecture, lots of history, everything is clean and beautiful – seriously, these people have got their shit together and seem to be so far ahead of the curve from us in North America. What’s the deal? It’s also interesting how racially homogeneous it is here. I know that’s to be expected, this being the old world and all, but it’s still a bit of a shock from someone so used to the multiculturalism of Toronto, where if I get on a subway car and there’s not one white face, it’s perfectly normal. Here, not so much.

Anyway, since I’m not on my laptop, I can’t upload any pictures (of which I have many). I’ll rectify that tomorrow when I get home. By this time tomorrow, I should be somewhere over Newfoundland and/Labrador. Can’t wait.

And seriously, this keyboard is messed up. Everything’s moved all over the place. Crazy Danes.

There’s something to be said for first impressions. Oslo was the first city in which we were able to dock right off of the downtown proper, so our first view out the ship’s windows this morning weren’t the massive shipbuilding cranes and shipping containers that characterized the ports in the other cities, but a look at the marina and downtown Oslo proper.

We hadn’t booked any tour for today and were planning to cover the relatively compact city by foot and public transportation, but some of the tour buses parked right outside the ship offered us some pretty good deals so it was bus tour time after all. First stop was about 2 minutes down the street, at the Akershus fortress. The compound included the Akershus Castle, which dates back to 13th century, as well as a museum to the resistance movement in WWII. It was also where the Nazis set up their headquarters during their occupation of Norway. After a brief walking tour of the complex, it was back on the bus and then a tour through downtown Oslo. A pristine and pretty city, if there was any upside to the Nazi occupation, it was that the city wasn’t decimated by bombing.

Stop two was a little ways outside of the downtown at Frogner Park, home to the Vigeland scupltures. The 75 acres contains the life’s work of Norway’s foremost sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, who made a deal with the city that they would give him land and he will fill it with his work – and what a job he did. Dedicated to the cycle of life, there’s hundreds of marvelous statues featuring nude figures of men, women and children in all activities and stages of life. The park is immaculately maintained and the sculptures fascinating to look at both individually and as a whole – I hadn’t been expecting too much from this stop of the tour, but it was easily my favourite sight in Oslo and easily one of the best of the trip.

The final stop was down on the Bygdoy peninsula where we had a pick of museums – either the Viking Ship Museum or the Kon Tiki and Fram ships. Being a fan of looting and pillaging, I went with the Vikings. The museum housed three Viking funeral ships dating back from the 9th century in various states of preservation. One was amazingly preserved, one barely recognizable as a ship. They also had artifacts recovered from the ships on display, though no information on why these crafts were buried instead of being set on fire and sent out to sea the way proper Vikings should be. Ah well. After the museum stops, it was back to the pier.

I still had just under an hour before the ship departed so I hoofed it back downtown (took under ten minutes) to get some pictures and get a better look at buildings like the City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded annually, the Parliment buildings, the famous Grand Hotel and down Karl Johans Gate, the Royal Palace. All very nice and picturesque, and I made it back to the ship with ten minutes to spare. Of course, I can think of worse fates than to be straneded in the country with the highest standard of living in the world. It was really beautiful and everyone looked so healthy and happy, it was sort of unnatural. It’s not overflowing with things to sightsee from a tourist POV, but it does seem like it’d be a good place to just live. Besides the fact that things are freaking expensive.

And now, we’re at sea for the last time, en route to Copenhagen. We disembark early tomorrow and spend the day in the Danish capital before flying home Friday. I am all packed up and more than ready to go…