Minor Rant…

I’ve just been through all my Varanasi photos and there are a few left that I’ll post over the next week.

We saw part of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday and were so appalled we left after cringing for an excruciating hour. We knew it couldn’t be the BBC series because there’s no time in a feature film, even if there had been the acting/directing/scriptwriting talent—but we hadn’t anticipated the possibility that it wouldn’t have anything to recommend it at all. The script was a joke, the acting deplorable, and the director should probably be shot. It was a movie entirely devoid of atmosphere and packed with finicky changes to detail that hacked to pieces the shape and colour of characters that we, the audience of a certain age, know far too well not to wince painfully at their loss. George Smiley living with a modern painting? Presumably the piece Ann was supposed to have given him after her affair with Bill Hayden. Utterly absurd! Or George Smiley confiding, in that dreadful attempt at an upper middle class Oxford accent that someone really should have advised Gary to drop, “Ann and I weren’t getting on.” If they didn’t want to make a spy movie about the characters as written, why remake this book? Why not write a new script about characters who do like modern art and sharing details of their personal lives with subordinates?

Anyway, we couldn’t stand it and left before the end. I realized as we made our way home to a supper of mashed potatoes and peas, that I would have preferred to have spent the time with this goat, the one that has such an interesting collection of T-shirts and lives on the banks of the Ganga, than 2011’s George and Peter and Ricky.

“Life is disappointing? Forget it! Here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the goats are beautiful!”