While we waited for her to arrive we looked for the much vaunted improvements to the station. (It was closed last week to allow work to go on.) While it is much better than it was, for example, two or three years ago, there does not seem to have been much change since the last time I was there, a couple of weeks before the closure for improvements. Even the new W.H. Smith (sort of) bookshop was not properly open yet: locked doors and employees busily stacking shelves.
There is a piano in the station forecourt. It has been there for a while but now sports a huge notice in a variety of languages inviting people to "Play me!" Unfortunately I spotted mistakes in the French, Spanish and Italian versions. Friends have since confirmed that the German and Arabic are seriously flawed as well. What chance do the other languages have? But then, maybe it's only pedants who notice! What's more, though, a station employee told us that the piano is basically ruined because they neglected to fasten down the lid that allows access to the insides - not the lid to the keyboard - and things have been put inside, wires have been pulled out and general mayhem and bits of vandalism have been wrought. What a shame! Anyway, back to our trip to the cinema: having checked that our granddaughter's train ticket entitled her to travel on trams in the city centre zone, we caught the next tram to the Castlefield station and crossed the road to Home, in plenty of time to buy our tickets for the film. That's when things went a little awry. Our plan was to see Ran, Japanese director Kurosawa's take on the King Lear story. It's out in a newly remastered version. However, Home, the specialist cinema/theatre complex had underestimated how many people would want to see it and were showing it in their small 33-seat cinema instead of one of their larger cinemas, of which there are about 5 in the complex. Did they not know that the film has been getting reviews in all the quality papers and arts programmes? The upshot was that we, and a rather large number of other people after us, found ourselves unable to buy tickets. They had sold out!
Nothing daunted, we looked for something else to watch instead and eventually opted for High Rise, based on a story by JG Ballard about the breakdown of society and civilised values in a huge, virtually self-contained block of luxury flats. The block contains a gym and a swimming pool, its own supermarket on the 15th floor and an immense roof garden, complete with shepherd's, or possible shepherdess's hut, and several animals, including a horse! The bottom twelve floors are inhabited by the less wealthy - you could not really call them poor although they all massively in debt with credit cards maxed out as they attempt to live the lifestyle of the tower block.
Ironically this film was shown in one of Home's larger cinemas to an audience of probably no more than 30 people!
High Rise, a wonderful view of another dystopia, we enjoyed it. The cast was impressive: Jeremy Irons, Elizabeth Moss - for me always the President's youngest daughter in The West Wing or Peggy in Madmen - her English accent was very good, if a little disconcerting when you are used to hearing her speak American - and the currently ubiquitous Tom Hiddlestone.
It's curious how young actors like Mr Hiddlestone come to the surface and are seen everywhere for a while. At the moment they all seem to be ex-public school boys, which is strange, and one bunch all went to the same private prep-school in Cambridge, not all at the same time but even so .... Tom Hiddlestone, whom we recently watched in The Night Manager on TV, once again played a very controlled, well-spoken, clearly expensively educated young man. It's hard to imagine him as a different sort of character whereas Dominic West, another public school escapee, very convincing played a not-so-upperclass, wild-drinking, womanising, charming rascal cop in The Wire. Maybe we just haven't yet seen enough of Mr Hiddlestone to judge his range.
Phil and I decided to have another try at seeing Ran this evening. The teenager opted out. Clearly she had had enough culture for the time or maybe just had other plans. So when we bought our tickets for High Rise we also booked tickets for this evening's showing of the Japanese film. As I made the booking, they asked for my name so that they could put me in their system. Fine, no problem! Then, as they fed in my details, I popped up as already registered, dating back to when I used to take groups of students to see French and Spanish films at the old Cornerhouse.
Name, date of birth, phone number: all correct. But my address was the college where I used to work up to eight years ago and the email was my old college email. Except that it wasn't quite. The year after I retired, the college merged with two others to become a larger entity. Everyone's email address was updated to include the new college name. And mine had been altered in the same way on the records which had gone from the Cornerhouse to Home, despite the fact that I had never worked with that email address.
Suddenly I was in an alternative reality: the me who might have been had I not retired in 2008!
This was probably quite appropriate for someone who was about to watch the strange, dystopian alternative reality created by JG Ballard!
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