explaining the 20th century

this week has mainly be filled with death, not an immediate member of the family (although my dog, fender sadly died last week) but during my cinema ushering shifts. through a cruel twist of fate i was ushering for BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA and then KATYN three times in one week. by the end of this week all i want to do is watch comedies.

the BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA was part of SCREEN SCHOOL. i'd not seen it but heard it was about kids who create a magical world. it was a lot less cgi laden than i had feared, the story mainly focussing on two bullied kids becoming friends and then going into the forest to build a treehouse and explore a make believe world they had created, their foes and heroes are clearly very real. it meandered along perfectly ok, a bit cheesey for me, but then i'm not 10 years old, it pleased me that the girls were ballsy and the situation seemed real. but was shocked at the end when *SPOILER ALERT* the little girl died! the kid came back from a museum visit to find his best friend dead! i thought he'd go to their magical place and she'd be there after all but she wasn't! the kids seemed to deal with this better than me. i spoke to the lecturer wynn thomas who said he'd chosen it because it was a mature film that would teach them about script writing and story.

the next day i was in for the long haul. i had a double shift of polish film KATYN, which i was also down for on my wednesday afternoon shift. it is the story of how the soviets killed 12,000 polish officers in world war two and blamed the nazis, the truth only coming out in the 1990s when peristroika open up the records. the majority of the army was made up of reservists: lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors; people who were needed to rebuild poland after the war so stalin decided that they were too valuable to live, that to increase the sense of chaos the soviet government could control he needed to execute them. director andrejz wadja is in his eighties and his father was one of those officers who just "disappeared", his mother believed till the day she died that one day he would come back to them and he wanted to tell the story of the massacre and the lie. the film expertly does both of these, showing a handful of families who lose people and try to cling on to some semblance of the truth. i suppose it is a kind of polish version of SCHINDLER'S LIST but without the hope at the end of escapees. anyone connected to the story who knew the truth was made to keep quiet or taken to the gulag for imprisonment or murdered. i was in pieces all three times. i kept thinking, "how do you explain this to children?" "how can we explain these crimes?" "why are they allowed to continue in countries like rwanda?" i was in a spin all week. some scenes were so painfully and brutally beautiful: the smoke obscuring the view in the first scene where the country becomes invaded on two sides; the washing away of the bloody in the factory-line style asassination chamber; the sandy earth being bulldozed over the bodies in the mass grave; the blank pages of the diary after the death of the officers.

i was very glad to get to work with casey and ewan again, to escape from there. i went to the museum where they were filming the rapey monster scenes. it sounds dark but was in fact wonderfully funny, i have had many ed wood moments on this shoot. mainly i was helping leah do some clean up and wrangling one of the reds behind the monster in the cave. there were museum staff on hand who were very helpful and nice. on a monday, when the museum is closed they do a stock take to make sure things haven't been tampered with and need to leave all the lights and videos running so it was wonderfully surreal being in the fibre glass cave and hearing a disembodied voice on a loop telling me about the ice age. every so often casey's voice directing chrissy the rapey monster would be drowned out by the woosh of the wind and the roar of a wooly mammouth. it was great! but we got very wet on the way home. i clearly need to re-waterproof my waterproof coat.

since the weather was so awful we spent a lot of nights in and i kept hankering for escape: romantic comedies, silly films. i made steen watch SINGING IN THE RAIN against his will but i think he quite enjoyed it. i laugh at donald o'connor's mugging in "make em laugh" and swoon at gene kelly every time i see it but i think steen was a bit bored. musical hater! the peak of silly films was reached on sunday night after getting back from work and finding brit com CONFETTI on tv. i was flicking around and saw the bloke that isn't david mitchell from MITCHELL AND WEBB with his knob out and kept watching. as it was bbc there were no adverts to break the spell and i ended up watching the whole thing. it was very high concept, a wedding magazine does a special on unusual weddings and pits three obsessions against each other to win a dream home: naturists, tennis and musicals. the musicals are clearly going to win the prize all the way through and the tennis pair were horrible and quite funny but the naturists were really sweet and nice and i really wanted them to win. steen didn't watch this with me but he said later he'd seen it in the cinema to see the lady from PEEP SHOW with her clothes off, so i found it funny that we'd been drawn to it for similar reasons.

another way to shake off the horror of the 20th century was pure escapism in the form of HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. i have no shame in liking harry potter, it doesn't make me an idiot and it doesn't make me a weirdo goth doing reenactment dressing up like a witch, either. i read the first book from a recommendation to keep my brain reading something light when i was on a break in the middle of my final exams at uni and quite enjoyed it. its not serious, its a kids book. you do get drawn in but i get drawn in by all sorts of things (archers plotlines, for example) but i'm not about to start calling actors by their character names in the street or anything. sorry if i sound defensive, i've had 10 years of ridicule. anyway, the film was all right. i wouldn't really care too much if it wasn't, i just want to see how it looks in someone else's head. i still have a problem with harry and hermione, in my head they were nowhere near as posh sounding as they are on screen but there we are, generally its very close to the book, the only one i've really hated has been the first one cos it was chris columbus directing and i find his stuff overly glossy, sluggish, mawkish, generally many kinds of "ish".

to finish off my week i've been reading jane fondas' autobiography MY LIFE SO FAR. i meant to go and see her speak at hay festival a couple of years ago when this came out, i've always liked jane fonda (stemming from a childhood obsession with BARBARELLA) and although its chocablock with californian therapy speak its really very candid and an good read. she's an interesting lady who has lived an interesting life. ah, well a week later since all that began i'm starting to feel a little heavy with the weight of all that history but i am very glad i was able to see KATYN.