3d for many p.

we began the week in the midst of another one of casey and ewan's video productions, this one for CATE LE BON. we were creating BONVILLE only to have her giant head destroy the town and setting us on fire. apparently. i'll wait till i see the finished product to know whether it was all nonsense from casey. i spent six frustrating but ultimately lovely hours making little paper houses. i completed a news stand and almost finished what we gathered by the end was a church (all the instructions, if we had them were in french) and steen made a donkey, a tank and a merry-go-round. sitting there listening to some brilliant 1920s jazz in le salon made it a perfect bank holiday monday, even if we didn't see much of the sun.

tuesday was the much anticipated MICACHU gig that was postponed from april. support came from the excellent THEM SQUIRRELS. i'd heard about this, a band with alex the cellist from FREDERICK STANLEY STAR doing a harder, madder sound and they didn't disappoint. the last song in particular went crazy and psychey with loops and screams and strobe lights, they left the stage and i felt exhilarated. unfortuntely they proved too difficult a band to follow, PICTURE BOOKS AT WINTER i've seen before and enjoyed but they left me a bit cold this evening, i was just bored after getting wound up into a frenzy. their tunes are good and i like all the things they have going on in their set, they're a well rehearsed band... but somehow it just seems a bit mannered and tame, or at least it did tonight. i was looking forward to MICACHU AND THE SHAPES, they did a great interview i'd read in plan b magazine and that brought up a painful subject for all of us. steen, the patti ladies and i loved plan b and we are all really upset at its demise. i have no idea how to find out about music now, i don't want to spend hours trailing through myspace or something, i want to open up a magazine and have someone i trust tell me what they sound like, no other magazine seems to describe things as perfectly and susinctly so i can hear them in my head. finally they came on and i went a bit giddy. the songs were great, stuttering, angular, wonky pop songs winningly delivered by a band of misfits. i must admit here to becoming completely infatuated by micachu whilst she was on stage for entirely non-objective un-serious unexplainable reasons. it was something about the way her lip curled and something about the way her hair curled around her ear or something about the way she held a guitar... i am quite aware that i sound like a tween talking about being at a jonas brothers gig. i haven't had a celebrity crush for ages, but here it is. i was drunk on infatuation for the rest of the evening and i think i made rather a fool of myself gushing to everyone around me how great she was afterwards. i don't think telling steen "she reminded me of you a bit" was particuarly comforting. oops.

wednesday i was the usher for CHERI, the new stephen frears film. it was reuniting him with christopher hampton and michelle pfeiffer who worked on one of my favourite movies DANGEROUS LIASONS so i was quite excited about seeing the film. it was similar in look to their previous film, but much lighter in tone. there was a jarringly odd fruity old man voice over that kept things from getting too serious and at each betrayal dismissed with a witty retort. michelle pfeiffer is wonderful as lea, a courtesan coming to the end of her career in fin de siecle paris. a fellow courtesan friend asks her to take care of her idle son and they begin an affair that lasts longer than anyone expects. although very happy, the match cannot last as his mother wants him to become a gentleman and have a family so arranges a marriage for him. they are both distraught but pretend to each other that they do not care and do more damage to each other. the film was a beautiful piece of fluff, i didn't care tremendously for the characters, especially the young man played by rupert friend, i just became irritated by them. it was saved, however, by a wonderful central performance by michelle pfeiffer, much of the film was discussing how a once reknowned beautiful woman can reconcile herself with old age and there is a fantastic lingering shot at the very end of her looking in the mirror noticing the lines on her face and the sagging skin. obviously, i wouldn't mind too much looking like michelle pfeiffer as she is now, let alone how she did at my age, she is still a very beautiful woman, but you could feel the pain of trying to remain dignified over something as undignified as losing your looks which has been regarded as your cache in life. i've never relied on my looks, such as they are, i spent years ignored and invisible due to my weight, so always tried to cultivate my brain and often even wished that i could just be a brain in a jar so not to have to deal with that side of myself at all. but we are all vain in our own way and this movie demonstrated the pain of losing something, whether it is the love of your life or your looks.

thursday we had a marathon day where we watched 3 movies. for me this isn't wholly unusual but for steen its a rare feat. when i finished work at 3pm we went to see CORALINE with our friend simon. we're going to miss it when it comes to chapter because we're away that week so we went to cineworld. i have a cineworld card but had left it at home. no problem i thought, for a treat, i'll pay for us, i'd looked it up and anything before 5pm had the matinee price of just over £5. this, however, was in 3D so it was £8.1o. i really wanted to see it so swallowed and gave the man my card. i am used to seeing films for free (staff comp at chapter and "free" being £13 per month subscription to cineworld) so paying over £16 for a movie for two made me blanche. however, as a treat it was worth it. it was a wonderful, genuinely creepy story about a feisty little girl who, bored in a new house investigates the papered up door and finds an alternate world where everything is perfect, her mother bakes delicious food, her father dotes on her and writes songs for her and the weirdos living in the other apartments are secret geniuses. she keeps creeping back and forth, visiting her "other mother" before realising, with help from the clever neighbourhood cat that something is wrong with this world. it was so beautiful to look at, so well animated. you could tell the difference between this older type of animation and CGI. the story was by neil gaiman, who will is familar with from his library work and i'd really love to read some of his books. when we got back later that night he remembered seeing my housemate benny have a copy of another neil gaiman story MIRRORMASK on dvd so we watched that. i liked this less but it was very differently handled. the heroine in mirrormask was an older teenage girl helena who sketches a world for herself and longs to escape the circus world that is her home and join the "real world". she argues with her mother who then collapses before her big top circus act and is taken to hospital. due to guilt or supernatural forces she falls into the world she has created with strange sphinx creatures where everyone wears a mask and is ruled by the queen of shadows. in order to escape and save the world of shadows from destruction she must find the mirrormask. the cast was amazing, gina mcgee and rob brydon playing her parents who also appear in the world of shadows and it was another feisty heroine. i was impressed with neil gaiman's ability and willingness to write such strong female roles, the men seemed impotent compared with the women.

we also saw TONY MANERO at chapter. we were looking forward to this, it won awards at the festivals late last year and was set in pinochet's chile. the story was a claustrophobic, disturbing look at that world where murder is not as questionable a crime as distributing political leaflets. we followed raul played by alfredo castro as he goes about his life, a nobody in a very real sense, he hardly seems there, he belongs in the shadows, only coming alive when he is living in the world of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. he creeps around in darkness, non descript and nothing, in fact the only time i recall him talking is when he is repeating the words in phonetic english from the movie. he moves rat-like around the city taking what he wanted by using violence with no hint of charisma but somehow manages to pull together a dance troupe with seemingly nothing but the power of his obsession for the movie. everyone in the dance troupe wants to know him, wants to possess him but he is not present enough to be possessed, he is not there, there is only tony manero. it was a brutal, unforgettable film leaving you feeling like you wanted to escape but knowing you couldn't, a wonderful example of what it was like to live under pinochet.

saturday i started my shift at chapter's SCREEN SCHOOL. i was tipped off about this by my friend matt beere who is running the education programme for chapter's cinema. it is a great little shift, that suits me down to the ground. it is an ushering shift but i also have to co-ordinate all the kids who are coming for their film education and help with the lectures. today was the buster keaton classic THE GENERAL. i dearly love silent film and made a special study of it at university so this was a real treat for me, the story of buster keaton's southern rail engineer in the civil war who is unable to enlist due to his usefulness to the cause but then gets the chance to thwart a northern attack whilst trying to rescue his beloved engine "the general" and his sweetheart at the same time. it includes the famous scene where he is sat on the engine axel and the engine starts, bobbing him up and down. i think the kids liked it, they were a little quiet but there were a laughs from the pratfalls. a few of them seemed really enthusiastic, one kid called kaya enthusiastically thrusting his hand up to try and explain how harold lloyd did his SAFETY LAST clock stunt. i think i'm going to really enjoy this shift! later that evening we went to a friends' house for yet another birthday bbq. the weather is fine, what a lovely week!