Take one large dose

When my sister in law and her family were staying with us we watched The Adjustment Bureau. It was a miracle that a realist like me (strictly no aliens, no end of the world, no fantasy) would even contemplate such a film… I quite enjoyed it but I spent quite a lot of time huffing and puffing about Emily Blunt’s dancing and her posture.  (EB’s character is a professional dancer.) Husband and SiL spent quite a lot of time laughing at my huffing and puffing. I know it’s ridiculous to let it spoil the film (when, frankly, a gigantic dose of suspension of disbelief had to be taken to watch the film AT ALL. I mean ‘hats’ enable them to go through the portal? Really?) Anyway the daft notion of the hats didn’t spoil the film but Emily Blunt’s dancing was a low level irritation all the way through. (You can tell a dancer from their posture, the way they move, even stand. It’s a useless piece of knowledge but I know it anyway.)

Eventually I turned to SiL and said ‘if we were watching a film about dressage and the rider was really pants, wouldn’t it irritate you?’ Because the thing is, any little thing that brings you crashing out of the story can act as an irritant and we need that belief.

I was thinking the same thing about reading. I open the book and I say ‘I am willing to believe.’ And you enter this wonderful, symbiotic relationship with the creator: you are prepared to believe and they will entertain you. I don’t think life gets much better than that.  But, if you encounter a gaffe, that tenuous rapport is shattered. For me the breaking of that contract is liked being sucked out of a vacuum.

Crumbs; this writing lark is a bit of a responsibility.

(Incidentally I think Natalie Portman (Black Swan) had considerably more background in dancing than EB and her posture was pretty good. I heard Deborah Bull on Radio 4 say that it takes ten years training to make a dancer’s arms look weightless and the only thing apart from this to let Natalie Portman down was that she didn’t have a dancer’s bottom! Of course, NP also had a dancing double and it was damn difficult, thankfully, to spot where she took over.)