On Monday October 3rd
2016 I went to see Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children at the Cineworld
Bolden in 3D using the monthly subscription for the first time in the month. As a Black card holder, issued after one year
of Red card membership I gain 25% on food, drink, sweets and ices purchased
from the cinema instead of the first year 10% in addition to the 25% reduction
available from three onsite restaurant chains. I have not checked the position
of the coffee shop within the cinema building as I prefer the coffee from the onsite
Macdonalds. We used to gain free attendance at Relays but with their expansion and
price increases all card holders get a reduction of at least 50%, similarly the
premium for 3D films appears to have been removed for everyone and the number
of 3D version of films also appears reduced and those still being released
concentrate on providing a clarity of depth rather than a constant barrage of
things flying out from the screen at you. Despite the astronomical cost of
buying extras at the Pics these days with my card I can still have a one scoop
tub of the flavour of the month ice cream for under £1.40 although this is
limited to a once a month a treat as also the half price sweets and quarter price
popcorn from the neighbouring supermarket are banned in the effort to get below
16 stone by New Year and for the first time in a decade.
I was attracted to seeing the film for two
reasons. I like the concept of Peculiar Children, preferring this to the
politically correct terms for children who are at the ends of the spectrum of
the norm. As a child before going to school I did not know I was different
except that I did not have a mother or father but lived with six aunties one of
whom was married with five and then six children. Because those first five years
covered the second world war, I knew terror, not directly in the sense of death
or permanent disability from the bombing and the rockets but because the
aunties were in a constant state of fear clutching their Rosaries and reciting
the Hail Marys and Our Father endlessly while we waited in the Anderson
Shelter. I retain a vivid memory of a V1 rocket, these flew lower and lower
than the V2, as the siren went in daytime and I could see the rocket coming
towards, cutting out and falling before it reached but I did not equate this
with the potential pain and sorrow had it reached. I came to know pain briefly when a nail in
the Shelter pierced my upper leg and I had to be taken to hospital with the
scar only disappearing decades later. It is possible to remember but without a
clear chronology, events which can be said with hindsight to mark a growing
awareness of being different, of feeling an inarticulate understanding of what was
being said and happening in the adult world, a sense of be different and
separate. The head teacher of the Catholic Preparatory Day school I attended
gave me a letter when I left aged 12 having been made two stay two years in one
class before failing the 11 plus and it was only before my 60th
birthday that I learned what that letter meant, the first and only letter I was
to receive until applying for a job at the age of 16.
Nor can I remember now when I
commenced to read about psychology and whether this was before or after I
stayed in prison for six month knowing that I could leave at any time but it
was from studying psychology part of in Public and Social Administration as
part of the Oxford University Diploma in public and Social Administration and
Home office arranged and funded
attendance at a child care training course at Birmingham University that
I developed a Freudian and not a Behaviour understanding of my development from
child to adult. Another two decades were to pass before I learned than my brain
wiring was different from that of other people and what other aspects of being
different meant, particularly in terms of relationships with others and a
potential role in society.
So from almost the point of
being aware of the separateness of others I felt but could not explain why I regarded
as different seeing the world differently. Because of the choices made as a
young adult who choose to leave school at sixteen years and work rather than
attempt the sixth form and to get to a seminary to be a catholic priest,
staying in prison for six months, rejecting the alternative to prison offered,
switching from a diploma course in Politics and Economics to a social work base
course in public and social administration which included psychology and then
undertaking another university and Home
Office approved and sponsored course in social work as a child care officer, I
first explained myself to myself as consequence of having been brought up first
as an orphan by aunties who spoke a different language which they did not teach me, because of being raised as secret
child with fundamentalist Catholic
beliefs, then because of the perspective of fundamentalist Freudians and Behaviourists, as an anti-totalitarian,
anti-capitalist anti-fascist pro
Satyagraha socialist and only in my forties explained myself because of my
physiology and brain being wired differently from others.
Despite the various explanations
of why I thought I was behaving, feeling and thinking as I have done and do, I
have always retained the belief in having behavioural and decision making
choices but understood that the freedom to exercise choice was limited by the absence
of freedom from. In my early twenties I agreed in part with the view of Erich
Fromm that every child should have the opportunity to develop their innate and
acquired abilities and interests to their maximum potential but not that these
were natural or God given but depended on the form of state and government in
which one was raised and worked and that the concept of being a subject of a
state, region, community and tribe, and in which one is in part dependent, is valid
and that in reality all men and (women)
are not borne equal or able to function as equals.
There has always been a role
for the Wild Duck, the thirteenth at table, the child who asked why the King
was wearing no clothes, together with Alice and Peter Pans, just as there
remains a role for the self-sacrifice of a seer, missionary, soldier or spy.
Because of viewing human life
and society from the perspective of the creative artist as well as from, constitutional
government, politics and economics, and from science and academic research, I have watched and re-watched the most popular
film series of the past decades all centring on children with missions because
of unique and special powers – The Alice
in Wonderlands, The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Harry Potter and the
X men and women and it was thus I went
to see Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children. I like Peculiar because it
sums up how society in general treats children who are different. a threat,
fear and hate, instead of special and a valuable social resource.
As in this film, a feature of
the other film series mentioned is that the heroes and heroines do not know
they are special and are often protected by those who understand their
potential because of the knowledge of how society and other children will react.
The protective desire to give children the opportunity to be viewed by others
as normal is responsible and is part of age old question about at what point do
you explain to a child they have been
adopted, they are illegitimate, one of their parents is
another, a parent was a murderer,
committed suicide, mad, a traitor, a
professional criminal, bisexual, a
paedophile or other sex offender or the basics of sex as well as the reality of
adult relationship, the different view of a God or no God?
The main subject of this film
is a normal boy where it is grandfather (Terence Stamp) who fills his head
about a children’s home where the adolescent children all have unique special
powers who face a threat from monsters. The boy, Jake, grows up and as a teenager
is called from work by someone concerned that his grandfather is suffering from
dementia but his grandfather urges him not attend but Jake ignores the advice finds
the grandfather at death’s door but able to imparts request to find a bird, a
loop and the significance of a date during World War II, which transpires to be
the date of a German bombing raid which destroys the Children’s Home and those
in it. The bird? It is no plot spoiler to mention the title again Miss
Peregrine, or that the loop involves the concept of time being circular as well
as linear. Jake also sees an apparition in the form of a monster, the head monster
in fact, played by Samuel L Jackson, who is also a shape shifter and where a
description of his roles in the film would be plot spoilers.[CS1]
Reminding of the relatives of
Harry Potter who brought him up in a cupboard under the stairs, and of my own
childhood where I would be banished to silence for hours in an upstairs bedroom
when relatives and friends of the aunties visited, Jake is made to attend
sessions with a psychiatrist to overcome the trauma of his experience, his grief
at the loss of his grandfather and what
he views as a waking nightmare, something which I also experienced as a
child, when ill and also of a consuming devil subsequently made similarly real
by the latest CGI techniques in a film whose name I cannot immediately remember.
The Psychiatrist is played by former West Wing Whitehouse media officer Allison
Janney. She becomes the bridge between what
he believes he witnessed and his rationality and agrees to him going to island of
the Children’s Home as a way of re-establishing reality and achieving closure.
Jake is taken to the Island
off the coast of Wales by his rejecting father played by Chris O’Dowd where
another aspect of his character, his perpetual innocence and naivety comes to the
fore (again something which I am able to identify). Fortunately, he is able to visit
the site of the former Children’s Home and enter the time loop which protects
them, meeting Miss Peregrine and the adolescents who all have different powers
but are divided between those of normal appearance and CGI adapted creations.
They re-live in a protected enjoyable form of Groundhog Day but aware of a
threat from what can be described as Fallen Angles and another Jekyll and Hyde
experiment gone wrong. Jake becomes aware that he has a special role to play in
not only the continuing protection of the children but the survival of other
special children at other locations in protected environments and that the threat
from the role played by Jackson and his associate shape shifters spells the end
of everyone in a gruesome way so that this is not a film for children despite
its title. It is no give away that Jake is successful and the special ones
learn how to protect themselves in the future and the setting of great battle in
Blackpool is noteworthy one of the great holiday playgrounds of the last
century before the freedoms of the sixties left the town to become one of the
drink, drug and sex pleasure grounds of western Europe. The film ends with Jake
faced with the choice of living in reality of the present or locked within a
circular past romantically happy. Judi Dench plays one of the associates of
Miss Peregrine.
The Associates can be regarded
as Priests and Priestesses with leadership duties and responsibilities which
sets them apart even from those they teach, care and protect and which means
they are unable to lead what is presented in the media and also in the arts as
normal lives.
The film is based on the three
novels by Ransome Riggs with the second called Hollow City and the third,
Library of Souls The original intention of Riggs was to create a graphic novel
and this was adapted by Cassandra Jean and published in 2013.
Possessing 3D glasses the cost
to me booking on line as a senior would have been £7.36 offset as part of a
monthly subscription of £17.40
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