this week i have mainly been watching THE TIME TRAVELLER'S WIFE. i watched it 3 times: sunday, wednesday and thursday. thankfully i was paid for watching it because otherwise i may have considered it some form of weird torture. i have not read the book and maybe the book is better but the film was a big ol' manipulative schmaltzfest. i the story was interesting for a sci fi nerd like me. when he is 6 years old he and his mother are involved in a car accident but he disappears within the space of a few seconds travels back to a time when he is being read to by his parents as a younger child and awakes naked watching his mother die in the car crash he was momentarily in and a man appears to him (his older self) to tell him not to be afraid and let him know what is happening: he is time travelling. we next meet him at this time when he is presumably in his early 20s working in a library and disappearing at varying and unwanted times to appear in familiar places to him (places that will be important in his life we discover later on). a pretty young woman comes up to him and speaks to him as if she knows him and invites him to dinner. at this dinner she explains that an older version of himself has been visiting her by time travelling ever since she was 6 years old and she has known him all her life. they (very) inevitably fall in love and get married and somtimes the time travelling makes things awkward (almost missing the wedding ceremony, only to turn up as himself from another time line) but its only when they are trying to a child that things get slightly angsty in their life. unfortunately it never seems to get too angsty. the couple seem to have a ridiculously happy and stress free life, which is helped along by him time travelling to win the lottery, one of many plot holes. the wife and precocious child seem too perfect and forgiving of all the strange things that happen to them. the film seems to be bathed in warm yellow light and a little manipulative so this interesting premise is transformed into a giant schmaltz fest. if it was not for eric bana being brilliant as usual i might have knawed my arm off in boredom through these three long performances.
i did manage to break up the time traveller monotony on sunday with a showing of the german gangster film CHIKO. the cast and crew were all quite young and although it dealt a familiar tale of youth turning to violence and drugs to try and get out of the ghetto it seemed to have a really fresh energy so although you'd seen this sort of story before, you hadn't seen HIS story before. the islamic turks have as strong a family loyalty as the italians in the godfather and betray the same religious dichotomy of women as whores or wives and mothers but we felt sympathy for chiko despite his cliched gangster ways which shows how nuanced the performance was from denis moschitto. the hamburg suburb seemed like it had learned nothing from chiko's story and that this situation would just keepgoing on and on. a good little story.
anticipating the meze fest and the knowledge that we will not make it to the pop quiz this month we went over to the HALFWAY PUB QUIZ, a traditional affair with a fruity old landlord reading the questions covering topics that did not include knowing obscure facts about record labels. on our team was me and steen, small steen and his new lady, the formidable caroline duffy and ed and anwen. we came second and won a bottle of red wine which was a nice bonus, its good to know that we have knowledge in something other than pop music, it made me feel less ghettoised. having a crush on glenda jackson helped in this case.
on thursday it was the highly anticipated LOVVERS LOOSE gig. a bunch of people were going since lovvers are known to be very ace (we last saw them supporting jay reatard in bristol last year) and recently crowned kings of local scene ISLET were also on the bill. it started with SATURDAYS KIDS all brattish and punky. i took a shine to them despite the fact that i was probably old enough to have sired them. ISLET came on next and were expectedly brilliant. i've seen them a bunch of times since their inception a few months ago and they just get better and better, with mark playing guitar with juddering, quivering urgency only inches from my face. HARBOUR were not my cup of tea. for the first time in ages i had to leave. i was having a bad footware day and that did not help with me being a bit tired too so i headed downstairs with anwen to have a nice sit down with emma and mark from islet. we went back up to watch the LOVVERS where the lead singer looks like he doesn't care, sings like a high pitched teen playing at being a punk rocker in his bedroom but somehow through the tight fit of the music it all makes sense and it sounds convincing. so convincing in fact that when a mumbled version of "what do i get?" is flung out at the end it feels like lovvers, not the buzzcocks were the first ones to perform it. a great evening.
saturday night i was ushering for the uhhuhuh dance company's production THE CELL in the theatre. the seeds of the show were sewn when the director happened upon an article that mentioned that when joseph mengele was arrested for war crimes he was put in a cell with a travelling musician who was disabled, the kind of person his life's work was dedicated to ridding the earth of. the incomparable jon luxton is at the heart of the theatre company and so it was charged with the knowledge that had he succeeded people like jon would not have been allowed to have been living. the play began with an extreme close up of a man's mouth, mengele's spouting nazi tract about the "need" to harness the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest to weed out the "bad" in society. it was bone chilling stuff. a woman entered the cell and her and jon seemed to lock horns, flirting and attracted and at the same time repulsed. jon's work in his chair was quite stunning to watch, it was graceful and beautiful but at the same time severely muscular and brutal. unfortunately the mood was broken with modern day jokey segments of dialogue with jon and jodie where they argued over whether to turn away from things that are wrong is comparable with german citizens in the 1930s. these pieces did not work for me and i think the show was an intense and facinating study just based on the movement alone. they seemed not to trust the value of the surreality of their show and this seemed a bit of a shame. the parts i enjoyed were indelible though and i hope to see their next production.
next week i hope to see more new things as this week i felt like i was on a repeat button seeing the time traveller's wife again and again, i saw the cell twice and ended up going to see the fantastic TRACES show again on wednesday so bring on the new!
26 Sept 2009
19 Sept 2009
freeeeedoooom!
well, this week has mostly been focussed on two things: me being a bit poorly and the cat being released into the wild. last week working in the box office i had an increasingly hurty head caused, i thought, by the thump thump of the flamenco dancers who have a class in the room above us. on returning home to steen i asked if we could just wrap up and watch movies instead of going out so that's what we did.
sunday was mental busy in the cafe, which didn't make me feel much better but then i was ushering in the cinema for MESRINE PART ONE: KILLER INSTINCT. having watched part two last week i have seen these in the wrong order really but part one was still worth watching. it is faster paced, there is more jam packed into it and rather than the bloated remorseless killer in PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, mesrine was on his way up the learning curve and this in itself was more interesting. KILLER INSTINCT set up the idea of mesrine as a brutal killer, but one was maybe formed by the french government: the brutalising of teenage mesrine in the algerian war and the problem of what to do with a young man who has been taught that might is right and the rough treatment he sustained in the montreal prison. but for all this there are moments when you realise that mesrine had a choice, he came from a middle class background but thrived in the underworld and surrounded himself with people who were seduced by and scared of him in equal measure. it is a fascinating story, more so for knowing that the french were so curious about him and how romanticised he was in his own country.
the film after that was THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD. the yes men are two anti-globalisation protestors who take part in "culture jamming" where they put up fake versions of corporate websites and pretend to be spokespeople for VIPs at conferences. whilst jigged up in their various disguises (usually just smart hair cuts and suits) they take the corporations' ideas to the extreme then give speeches to the delegates and members of the public and see how far they can take the joke. sometimes they get found out immediately and ushered out of the auditorium and sometimes the means has a very useful end. in the past they have provoked bush into famously saying "there should be limits on freedom" after theypublicly embarrassed him and here the biggest stunt had them posing as chemical company DOW's spokespeople and announcing that they would right their wrongs and compensate the people of bhopal for the chemical tragedy caused by their company in 1984. they managed to get on the bbc to announce this and used it to force the issue and make the company react but instead the company simply printed a retraction statement and saw their shares dip nearly 3%. another stunt here sees them getting an official haliburton deligate dress up in a giant blow up condom looking like a space bee and suggest to them that it had military and global warming potential and asking them if it would be possible to attach weapons to the suit. ludicrous. all of this has a point. if DOW made this announcement the share market would punish it, but it would be the right thing to do. DOW will never do this. it was an interesting film and the yes men were thankfully not smug, just engaging and funny.
after this i hot footed it to town to meet steen who was djing at the loose gig for BLITZEN TRAPPER. since it was so late i didn't think i'd make it with any time to see songs but i saw about four songs. i wasn't impressed to be honest, very alt country veering on lynryd skynyrd territory with one bit of feedback i liked that lasted about 30 seconds so i wasn't sorry i'd missed it. more sorry to miss the lovely MARTIN CARR do his thing with a big bunch of cardiff lovelies. pah! next time, gadget! but i was starting to feel a bit under the weather too, which would stop me from missing the brilliant SHE KEEPS BEES gig on the monday too. booo! one week where there is a gig per day of great quality andi've missed almost all of them!
one that i didn't miss was on wednesday: TIMES NEW VIKING. we saw them last year in clwb and they weren't just bloody brilliant but really lovely when we had a chat with them afterwards. subsequently they have had a lot of press and i was worried they would be a bit polished and arch but was still looking forward to it very much. the first support band on was the inimitable GINDRINKER. they did a sort of greatest hits set which played to the crowd nicely. they have a lot of bloody great songs that make your mouth curl up in a half smile, half grimace. BANJO OR FREAKOUT were on afters and steen likes them mucho. i liked them too, even if a tardy week later i can't remember much about their set, sorry. what i do remember is TIMES NEW VIKING coming out a little slicker than previously (certainly the singer's hair, which looked well silky) but still sounding diy and fresh. a mean feat. they do excellent pop songs that deserve to be danced around by teenagers in their pants in their bedrooms (well, this is what i would do if i'd heard them as a teenager, i've certainly done it as an adult). we immediately go out and i spend the money i was saving for things like food on things like 7" singles. oops.
friday will and i had the afternoon off together so went to the cinema to see the new almodovar film BROKEN EMBRACES (LA ABRAZOS ROTOS). i'm a big fan of his and was really excited about seeing this film. i had a picture of almodovar on my folder at school when i was 14 and made an effort to see as many films of his as possible. i loved all the candy coloured sets, flamboyant characters, the comedy and the melodrama. in recent years his films have matured with him and especially since the moving TODO SABRE MI MADRE (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) they have taken on a seriousness he previously avoided. one of my all time favourite films is still HABLA CON ELLA (TALK TO HER) and that got very dark and introspective in places, the colours muted and the joy mixed with sadness. BROKEN EMBRACES has a blind scriptwriter's assistant needs to leave town for a while and leaves her son diego looking after him, who in turn has an accident himself. diego digs into the big secret about events that led to him giving up directing and becoming blind. the film has famously been described as almodovar's love letter to penelope cruz, his latterday muse, it is about a director's relationship to an actress and the difficulty of making a great film. unfortunately i did not think this was a great film. the melodrama was predictable (never something i have thought him capable of) and a little dull and the film within the film "comedy" of candy-coloured film "girls and suitcases" was not very convincing despite the joyous appearance of his previous muse rossy de palma. it had wonderful flourishes and he will probably never be able to make a film that is not interesting and without merit but after such a run of high drama and full, rich almost voluptuous films this felt a bit lacking in substance, tall (2 hours plus) but thin.
later that evening i was the barlady for the DRONES comedy club upstairs in chapter. due to all sorts of silly circumstances i haven't been able to do this shift for a long while and i'd forgotten how much fun it can be. the two dans and clint are great company and they were all out celebrating laura bryon's birthday the night before so how they stayed so sparky on stage was no mean feat. joined by so many other comedians i lost count but one of them being the very lovely ben partridge it meant that this night did not feel at all like work and instead i chuckled behind the bar all night. after running around like a mad thing to get the booze downstairs i returned home all smiley and happy. good nights' work!
the main event that has dominated this week has not been a film or a good gig but instead the emancipation of our cat frankie. i picked him up from splott library about a year ago and have done my darnedest to make sure he is well looked after like the baby substitute he truly is! i read up all my cat books, got advice from the vet and all of them say that its best to not let a cat out at least until its over 6 months old and spayed (some saying as old as a year old) and certainly not let them out at night. as he was a curious little sod who kept trying to escape every time we left the house we bought a harness and took him outside as often as we could so he could get used to it. just after 8 months when the weather was good i ordered a catflap and waited for him to pop his head through it. i had to wait a long time. he would look at the catflap and mew with incomprehension. we started lifting the lid of the catflaps so he'd get the idea. he didn't. so, about 4 months on, on sunday, i was stood in the kitchen and he was pawing at it and actually pushed through! joy! mixed with worry! this meant that the cat would actually be able to properly use the catflap. this meant that he would be able to go out by himself and i would not be able to guarantee his safety. like a mother who can't cut the cord i was suddenly all upset and wanted him to regress to kittenhood again. me and steen took turns to let him out and watch him come back in but i still wasn't happy with leaving the catflap open whilst we were out. then tuesday i had to go home from work ill and was forced to spend the whole day in the house so i thought i'd be brave and just let frankie do his thing. happily he came in and out of the catflap with ease and i was completely reassured. a week on from this and he seems like a much happier cat, no longer anxious to go outside and see what is going down, he comes through the catflap cooing when he sees us. its made things easier for us too, whilst the harness is useful it felt awful having to limit his travels when he is such an adventurer and it has made steen hunger for a cat cam he's seen on the internet, eager to find out where he's been in his day. all together a much happier household!
sunday was mental busy in the cafe, which didn't make me feel much better but then i was ushering in the cinema for MESRINE PART ONE: KILLER INSTINCT. having watched part two last week i have seen these in the wrong order really but part one was still worth watching. it is faster paced, there is more jam packed into it and rather than the bloated remorseless killer in PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, mesrine was on his way up the learning curve and this in itself was more interesting. KILLER INSTINCT set up the idea of mesrine as a brutal killer, but one was maybe formed by the french government: the brutalising of teenage mesrine in the algerian war and the problem of what to do with a young man who has been taught that might is right and the rough treatment he sustained in the montreal prison. but for all this there are moments when you realise that mesrine had a choice, he came from a middle class background but thrived in the underworld and surrounded himself with people who were seduced by and scared of him in equal measure. it is a fascinating story, more so for knowing that the french were so curious about him and how romanticised he was in his own country.
the film after that was THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD. the yes men are two anti-globalisation protestors who take part in "culture jamming" where they put up fake versions of corporate websites and pretend to be spokespeople for VIPs at conferences. whilst jigged up in their various disguises (usually just smart hair cuts and suits) they take the corporations' ideas to the extreme then give speeches to the delegates and members of the public and see how far they can take the joke. sometimes they get found out immediately and ushered out of the auditorium and sometimes the means has a very useful end. in the past they have provoked bush into famously saying "there should be limits on freedom" after theypublicly embarrassed him and here the biggest stunt had them posing as chemical company DOW's spokespeople and announcing that they would right their wrongs and compensate the people of bhopal for the chemical tragedy caused by their company in 1984. they managed to get on the bbc to announce this and used it to force the issue and make the company react but instead the company simply printed a retraction statement and saw their shares dip nearly 3%. another stunt here sees them getting an official haliburton deligate dress up in a giant blow up condom looking like a space bee and suggest to them that it had military and global warming potential and asking them if it would be possible to attach weapons to the suit. ludicrous. all of this has a point. if DOW made this announcement the share market would punish it, but it would be the right thing to do. DOW will never do this. it was an interesting film and the yes men were thankfully not smug, just engaging and funny.
after this i hot footed it to town to meet steen who was djing at the loose gig for BLITZEN TRAPPER. since it was so late i didn't think i'd make it with any time to see songs but i saw about four songs. i wasn't impressed to be honest, very alt country veering on lynryd skynyrd territory with one bit of feedback i liked that lasted about 30 seconds so i wasn't sorry i'd missed it. more sorry to miss the lovely MARTIN CARR do his thing with a big bunch of cardiff lovelies. pah! next time, gadget! but i was starting to feel a bit under the weather too, which would stop me from missing the brilliant SHE KEEPS BEES gig on the monday too. booo! one week where there is a gig per day of great quality andi've missed almost all of them!
one that i didn't miss was on wednesday: TIMES NEW VIKING. we saw them last year in clwb and they weren't just bloody brilliant but really lovely when we had a chat with them afterwards. subsequently they have had a lot of press and i was worried they would be a bit polished and arch but was still looking forward to it very much. the first support band on was the inimitable GINDRINKER. they did a sort of greatest hits set which played to the crowd nicely. they have a lot of bloody great songs that make your mouth curl up in a half smile, half grimace. BANJO OR FREAKOUT were on afters and steen likes them mucho. i liked them too, even if a tardy week later i can't remember much about their set, sorry. what i do remember is TIMES NEW VIKING coming out a little slicker than previously (certainly the singer's hair, which looked well silky) but still sounding diy and fresh. a mean feat. they do excellent pop songs that deserve to be danced around by teenagers in their pants in their bedrooms (well, this is what i would do if i'd heard them as a teenager, i've certainly done it as an adult). we immediately go out and i spend the money i was saving for things like food on things like 7" singles. oops.
friday will and i had the afternoon off together so went to the cinema to see the new almodovar film BROKEN EMBRACES (LA ABRAZOS ROTOS). i'm a big fan of his and was really excited about seeing this film. i had a picture of almodovar on my folder at school when i was 14 and made an effort to see as many films of his as possible. i loved all the candy coloured sets, flamboyant characters, the comedy and the melodrama. in recent years his films have matured with him and especially since the moving TODO SABRE MI MADRE (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) they have taken on a seriousness he previously avoided. one of my all time favourite films is still HABLA CON ELLA (TALK TO HER) and that got very dark and introspective in places, the colours muted and the joy mixed with sadness. BROKEN EMBRACES has a blind scriptwriter's assistant needs to leave town for a while and leaves her son diego looking after him, who in turn has an accident himself. diego digs into the big secret about events that led to him giving up directing and becoming blind. the film has famously been described as almodovar's love letter to penelope cruz, his latterday muse, it is about a director's relationship to an actress and the difficulty of making a great film. unfortunately i did not think this was a great film. the melodrama was predictable (never something i have thought him capable of) and a little dull and the film within the film "comedy" of candy-coloured film "girls and suitcases" was not very convincing despite the joyous appearance of his previous muse rossy de palma. it had wonderful flourishes and he will probably never be able to make a film that is not interesting and without merit but after such a run of high drama and full, rich almost voluptuous films this felt a bit lacking in substance, tall (2 hours plus) but thin.
later that evening i was the barlady for the DRONES comedy club upstairs in chapter. due to all sorts of silly circumstances i haven't been able to do this shift for a long while and i'd forgotten how much fun it can be. the two dans and clint are great company and they were all out celebrating laura bryon's birthday the night before so how they stayed so sparky on stage was no mean feat. joined by so many other comedians i lost count but one of them being the very lovely ben partridge it meant that this night did not feel at all like work and instead i chuckled behind the bar all night. after running around like a mad thing to get the booze downstairs i returned home all smiley and happy. good nights' work!
the main event that has dominated this week has not been a film or a good gig but instead the emancipation of our cat frankie. i picked him up from splott library about a year ago and have done my darnedest to make sure he is well looked after like the baby substitute he truly is! i read up all my cat books, got advice from the vet and all of them say that its best to not let a cat out at least until its over 6 months old and spayed (some saying as old as a year old) and certainly not let them out at night. as he was a curious little sod who kept trying to escape every time we left the house we bought a harness and took him outside as often as we could so he could get used to it. just after 8 months when the weather was good i ordered a catflap and waited for him to pop his head through it. i had to wait a long time. he would look at the catflap and mew with incomprehension. we started lifting the lid of the catflaps so he'd get the idea. he didn't. so, about 4 months on, on sunday, i was stood in the kitchen and he was pawing at it and actually pushed through! joy! mixed with worry! this meant that the cat would actually be able to properly use the catflap. this meant that he would be able to go out by himself and i would not be able to guarantee his safety. like a mother who can't cut the cord i was suddenly all upset and wanted him to regress to kittenhood again. me and steen took turns to let him out and watch him come back in but i still wasn't happy with leaving the catflap open whilst we were out. then tuesday i had to go home from work ill and was forced to spend the whole day in the house so i thought i'd be brave and just let frankie do his thing. happily he came in and out of the catflap with ease and i was completely reassured. a week on from this and he seems like a much happier cat, no longer anxious to go outside and see what is going down, he comes through the catflap cooing when he sees us. its made things easier for us too, whilst the harness is useful it felt awful having to limit his travels when he is such an adventurer and it has made steen hunger for a cat cam he's seen on the internet, eager to find out where he's been in his day. all together a much happier household!
12 Sept 2009
filling the theatre
saturday night we celebrated the return of CHAPTER THEATRE. for the past year we have been using the LLOFFT space above the bar (limited as it can only fit 40 people) and outside spaces for shows and it has felt a bit like doing a show in a school hall at times so it was a relief and a joy to finally open the theatre for the new show by TANYA RAMAN called TRACES. it was a shame we couldn't have had a more grand reopening with champagne and party poppers because the show itself was simply one of the best things i have seen in the theatre and the perfect way to show off the staff and facilities here at chapter. we started off in complete darkness then old photographs appeared on the screen and we were surrounded by voices talking of memories and the lapping of water and a low drone. the photographs bled into the image of a woman in the dressing room looking into the mirror, barely moving. after a few beats there was another woman in there, a replicated image moving differently. then there was another. she looked out from the screen to us. this in turn faded and we could see the woman appearing at the back of the stage. she moved carefully around the stage and stopped for us to see this repeated on a projection on the screen in front of her. her movements would overlap with the movements of the ghost people on the screen and then went black. the next stage was her costume of light moving around the stage with her movements, only to be captured and flashed back on the screen. john collingsworth then took a light pen and drew around her body in its pose and these flashed on, then he tried to pin her down in pencil drawings. it grew more fevered and exciting and then faded again. it was so intense and beautiful it made me cry. it is difficult to describe how this effected me, it was only part way through the show that i recognised my voice amongst the whispering sounds on stage. my friend jon had asked me months ago to contribute a few memories to be used for his soundscape for the piece but i had entirely forgotten about this. one of the memories i had was being in the village where i was born, me and my brother being woken up early in the morning by my mum to see the cove near our house that had frozen over with the frost. i was overcome by the beauty of the images in front of me, by the movement of tanya's body and the swell of the music, by the realisation that all our memories will one day fade but that we leave traces of ourselves behind. it was a wonderful experience.
we were jolted out of that to go see our friend colin have a birthday do in the landsdowne pub. it was fancy dress and the theme was "characters from S4C". we couldn't go from the theatre to fancy dress so i just went in red and black (sort of welsh dress). it was fab evening with many sali malis, farmers, a superted and lots of cheesey dance music. we spent most of the time hanging out by the amazing buffet with gar, ange, rich and rhian and pedro and darren. good times.
sunday was a marathon cinema day. my matinee was an italian film MID AUGUST LUNCH (which is a bit of a crap meaningless title, they should have kept it as FERRAGOSTO, which is actually the religious holiday that makes the lunch special). it was absolutely delightful. written, directed and starring gianni di gregorio it is the simple tale of a middle aged man who lives with his elderly mother in a shabby but tidy apartment in rome and is behind with the rent and a bit down on his luck. the landlord persuades him to take in his mother for the ferragosto weekend in exchange for the arrears and a bit of extra cash and when he turns up he has also brought his elderly aunt. the doctor comes to see his mother and mentions that his own mother will be on her own for the festival as he has to work in the hospital. gianni agrees to take her in too, in exchange for the medical bill. finding himself in the company of four elderly slightly fussy ladies gianni is graceful if a little beleaguered, smoking cooking and pouring wine sometimes all at once and trying to keep everyone happy. the farce element of the story is played down and the tone is kept light. it never feels patronising to the old ladies, they are people rather than dotty old biddies, the warmth of the family and community just glows and the whole thing feels like a perfectly baked souffle. a lovely little film.
up next was a really interesting set of documentaries by HUMPHREY JENNINGS. he made some important films around the second world war about life in britain, some of them for the purpose of propaganda. the first one was called "spare time" and talked about the working man in mining and manufacturing towns and what they did when they no longer had to be in the dark dank factories and mines. there was dancing, drinking, games and meals with the family. it had some lovely footage of ballroom dancing in blackpool and pubs in pontypridd. the next film was "the silent village" a wonderful propaganda piece about a mining village poland that had been taken over by the nazis. jennings cleverly mirrored this with a mining village in west wales. we watched the people of the village getting on with their business: going to the local shop for food, working down the mine, going to the pub, going to community meetings only to have this interrupted by the nazi invasion. we never saw more than one soldier but heard the german accented message barked out that the village had been taken over by the nazi party and that they had to obey orders. the villagers saboutaged the mine resulting in the men being shot and the women and children taken to concentration camps. all this happened to the village lidice in poland and the reality of it really hit home. using the people of the village rather than actors gave it a tinge of reality and steely resolve at the end not to let happen in britain what happened in poland. the pit manager at the end said that although the village was wiped off the map with the people gone and buildings destroyed they would not be forgotten as they had been through that experience. the film was really effective, gave a real sense of the way the people of britain reacted to the humanity of the war and the community spirit. the one feeling the documentaries left me with was the sadness that the nazis may not have taken away our way of life but thatcher managed to destroy the mines in the 80s and how different things are now. it was odd looking at that life that is only our grandparents' generation but to today's children must seem like the stone age. things are so so different now. its stupid to say everything is shit these days but the simple, gentle life of the people humphrey jennings shows makes you feel incredibly selfish and shallow and long for the past.
i didn't leave the cinema once i'd finished ushering but instead changed screen and went to cinema 2 for the BAD FILM CLUB: SNAKES ON A TRAIN. i was glad i'd got tickets for will and i and that our friend katy had got in since the cinema was packed, in fact bizarrely they had oversold the tickets. as i work in the box office i know that this is not possible to do unless something has gone very wrong! i think it was something about switching screens but nicko was surprised as anyone that they had sold out. clint did the commentary with her but it hardly needed any, it was a very stupid wonderfully bad film. the first 15 minutes was entirely in spanish which is fine but when they got on the train itself the characters spoke in english so that didn't even make any sense. a lot didn't make any sense. the main character was throwing up snakes and her boyfriend was keeping them in a jar. the reason he is doing this is because she has been cursed by her family. she "has snakes" is the explanation. riiiight. once on the train we meet some of the other, pointless cliched characters and their way of sort of spurring on the plot and we see a lot more snakes thrown up by this poor woman. at one point they have sort of overtaken her and this giant snake comes out of her or she becomes a giant snake or something and everyone jumps off the train just in time before she swallows the train whole. an amulet that was being used by her boyfriend finally comes in handy as it glows white and causes a huge tornado to swallow up the giant snake as if nothing happened. rubbish. it was so silly and ridiculous. nicko cleverly makes it seem like we've all been through this terrible experience together, taking you out of the usual film experience of sitting in the dark with the images coming into your head and turns it into almost a music hall style theatre show.
monday we were back in the cinema but this time for CHAPTER MOVIEMAKER for the premiere of two of the music videos we've worked on in the last few months. ryan owen and ben reed's work on RACE HORSES "cake" and ewan and casey (raymo)'s work on CATE LE BON's "hollow trees house hounds". they are both really good and very different from each other. race horses video is fun, featuring steen being hit in the face by a big cream cake and cate's is trippy and psychey with great mutant animations and you get to see me and my friends burn. the moviemaker is a strange little entity where all sorts of things are shown, from amateur shorts that people are trying out to professional films. we also saw the pilot of a tv show that didn't get picked up, a small documentary about a singer who was killed by pinochet's troups in chile and the new one from the fiction factory. afterwards we went for a drink with raymo and the gang but i was hideously broke and tired (i'd already spent far too much time in chapter over the last 72 hours) so went home to watch MEAN GIRLS instead and muse on the fact that lindsay lohan had the world at her feet and chucked it all for crack and hanging out with paris hilton.
tuesday i was ushering for one of michael kelligan's readings, this month it was the new patrick jones play DANDELION. it was a real treat as it was well acted and full of wonderful lines. the cast had the script in their hands but already seemed to know the characters really well. the setting was an old folks home where earnest is trying to rebel, get the old ladies thinking about the world around them. at times it felt a bit like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST when the characters talk about fleeing, but what to? this is a world that has finished with them. i thought it was a bit overlong, the romance element seeming to be a bit tacked on but it was wonderful and made you think about how we treat the elderly, especially after seeing MID AUGUST LUNCH.
on wednesday i was ushering for SLEEP FURIOUSLY again (wonderful every time but still makes me sleepy) and then was doing some cover for the cinema department in the evening. first up was the BAFTA PREVIEW SCREENING of THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. a little thrill of excitement went through me when i heard that this is what it was, i had hoped to see it at some point so it was nice to get to go to the preview. the september issue of vogue magazine is the most important of the year, one commentator said that it is like the new year for fashion, out with the old in with the new and everyone wants to know what the new is. what is new is partly determined by anna wintour, the editor of vogue. she and her team go around all the fashion shows and decide what the narratives of the collections are, what ideas are put forward and who should be showcased. anna wintour is a very powerful lady, many know her better as "nuclear wintour" for her icy demeanour. she is the person who they based the scary editor of the magazine in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, for years she has been a sort of archetype of fashion women and career women. this film gave her and her industry more depth and showed just what they do. someone who shone throughout the film was the magazine's stylist grace coddington. grace started at vogue at the same time as anna and the two know and respect each other a great deal, despite the odd disagreement about dropping pages from a photoshoot. grace is obviously very good at her job that she clearly loves and feels passionately about. to put it in a simplistic way grace is the beauty and anna is the brains but of course the truth is a lot more complicated than that. the film made the jobs of these people very important, almost seeming to be life or death but it also exposed how silly the whole thing is. a lot of the fashion industry seems to be like the emporers' new clothes. anna decides something is good so it is good and no-one questions her. they fuss and pout about these things (behind her back, to her face they just agree) but no-one challenges her. the one person allowed to challenge her was her daughter. in a bubble bursting moment she mentioned that her mother wants her to be an editor (to follow in the family tradition, anna's father was the editor of the evening standard) but she wants to be a lawyer as she finds it all a bit stupid, anna was not present for this interview. there was a real sadness about anna wintour that came out in the film. despite its protestations the commercial side of fashion tends to make people despise themselves and you got the feeling that its a profession that makes you in turn feel a bit worthless in the end. it was thrilling to be taken on this journey with them.
the next film was the epic MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS. i went to this not sure what to expect. i'd heard it was well respected and that paul schrader, george lucas and francis ford coppola all contributed to it in their early 80s heyday (part of their well known worship of japanese film and mythology) but that was all. it turned out to be a highly stylised facinating study of a man's life. again, i had heard of japanese writer yukio mishima but did not know the details. the film attempted to illuminate his life through his works, the chapters beauty "the temple of the golden pavillion", art "kyko's house", action "runaway horses" and the harmony between the pen and the sword which runs throughout the film and culminates in mishima's death by suicide. this film is so controversial in japan that it is officially banned, mishima's politics that hark back to the days of imperialism being too difficult to discuss. the film was interesting and intense and as an experiment in illustrating a man's life via his work it really worked. the famous score by phillip glass was just amazing and it was a thrill to be surrounded by those vivid colours and the escalating cascade of synths and strings. however, it did seem a little old fashioned and i was very aware all the way through that it was a film made by bunch of foreigners, i wasn't convinced that they were not too in love with the idea of mishima and took him a little too seriously. his politics and the way he lived his life made him seem very callous and petty at times.
i went home after that and will had bought a lovely bottle of wine and we drank and chatted happily, as we got to spend the next day together! we don't get many days off together since i work on a sunday. we both had thursday off and steen decided that since i'd been paid it was time for a bit of a day out so we went to penarth to see the new FFOTOGALLERY ANNA FOX: COCKROACH DIARIES show and did some charity shopping and had an ice cream on the pier. perfect! the exhibition was interesting, she lived in a shared house in london in the early 90s and documented the strange things previous tenants had left there or drawn on the walls and the infestation that reading the diary entries made her life seem not really a britpop era fun time but instead a few scenes from THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. we found some good bargains in the brilliant charity shops in town (i think we counted 6) including the FABER BOOK OF POP MUSIC, essays edited by hanif kareshi, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (a book i read and owned but left with another student in america), a hip flask and a brilliant bag covered with racing cars. i tried on a couple of dresses that didn't look right and steen tried on a coat that he didn't like but i loved (i took a photo of it to remind myself). we dashed back to cardiff to catch early orders at ICHIBAN.
we got back and played with the cat for a bit before i had to head back to chapter to usher for EMti, the new play from angharad evans by the real life theatre company. my friends cathryn and hef were planning to go and i was excited to see them but also dreading it, i'd seen the last play they'd put on and thought it was one of the worst things i'd seen: horribly pretentious and horrible acting. luckily, it wasn't as bad as that! they had a very good cast and the play was well put together. inspired by her own brother's suicide the play was about a young man struggling between an oppressive family and the release of death. apart from the unnecessary and frankly humourous "movement" from dominque fester (was she supposed to be an angel? i'm not sure, but her presence was intrusive and unhelpful) the scenes were powerful and grew increasingly intense. evans' work still suffers from the feeling that it could have been written by a younger more inexperienced playwright but here there was at least hope that the company will improve, the inclusion of other performers seemed to truly be a good path to take. i had a lovely drink with cathryn and hefin, it was lovely to see them again after so long.
friday i was ushering for MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1 (PART2). this was fairly annoying since i'd not yet seen part 1 but ho hum. it wasn't hard to follow. jacques mesrine was the most notorious gangster of the 70s in france, a charismatic self aggrandiser who liked being known as an "honest gangster" and even tried to style himself into a baader-meinhof revolutionary towards the end of his career. he wrote a book bragging of his deeds and gave interviews with the press to increase his notoriety and enjoyed the idea of being the number one hate figure with the police, thinking of himself as a modern day robin hood. although i've missed the first (and apparently better) half of the story, the central performance by vincent cassell made the whole thing very easy to follow, you were drawn to mesrine. you didn't know whether he would be loving and affectionate or murderous and frightening, i don't know many actors who could have pulled that off.
well, i end this week looking forward to maybe a night off from chapter. for all the wonderful things i get to do here i will be savouring a night in maybe just listening to music or reading. it is great to see it busy and full and we have such great shows here its well deserved. but it has been a busy week, as usual and i am looking forward to playing with the cat and being away for the evening.
we were jolted out of that to go see our friend colin have a birthday do in the landsdowne pub. it was fancy dress and the theme was "characters from S4C". we couldn't go from the theatre to fancy dress so i just went in red and black (sort of welsh dress). it was fab evening with many sali malis, farmers, a superted and lots of cheesey dance music. we spent most of the time hanging out by the amazing buffet with gar, ange, rich and rhian and pedro and darren. good times.
sunday was a marathon cinema day. my matinee was an italian film MID AUGUST LUNCH (which is a bit of a crap meaningless title, they should have kept it as FERRAGOSTO, which is actually the religious holiday that makes the lunch special). it was absolutely delightful. written, directed and starring gianni di gregorio it is the simple tale of a middle aged man who lives with his elderly mother in a shabby but tidy apartment in rome and is behind with the rent and a bit down on his luck. the landlord persuades him to take in his mother for the ferragosto weekend in exchange for the arrears and a bit of extra cash and when he turns up he has also brought his elderly aunt. the doctor comes to see his mother and mentions that his own mother will be on her own for the festival as he has to work in the hospital. gianni agrees to take her in too, in exchange for the medical bill. finding himself in the company of four elderly slightly fussy ladies gianni is graceful if a little beleaguered, smoking cooking and pouring wine sometimes all at once and trying to keep everyone happy. the farce element of the story is played down and the tone is kept light. it never feels patronising to the old ladies, they are people rather than dotty old biddies, the warmth of the family and community just glows and the whole thing feels like a perfectly baked souffle. a lovely little film.
up next was a really interesting set of documentaries by HUMPHREY JENNINGS. he made some important films around the second world war about life in britain, some of them for the purpose of propaganda. the first one was called "spare time" and talked about the working man in mining and manufacturing towns and what they did when they no longer had to be in the dark dank factories and mines. there was dancing, drinking, games and meals with the family. it had some lovely footage of ballroom dancing in blackpool and pubs in pontypridd. the next film was "the silent village" a wonderful propaganda piece about a mining village poland that had been taken over by the nazis. jennings cleverly mirrored this with a mining village in west wales. we watched the people of the village getting on with their business: going to the local shop for food, working down the mine, going to the pub, going to community meetings only to have this interrupted by the nazi invasion. we never saw more than one soldier but heard the german accented message barked out that the village had been taken over by the nazi party and that they had to obey orders. the villagers saboutaged the mine resulting in the men being shot and the women and children taken to concentration camps. all this happened to the village lidice in poland and the reality of it really hit home. using the people of the village rather than actors gave it a tinge of reality and steely resolve at the end not to let happen in britain what happened in poland. the pit manager at the end said that although the village was wiped off the map with the people gone and buildings destroyed they would not be forgotten as they had been through that experience. the film was really effective, gave a real sense of the way the people of britain reacted to the humanity of the war and the community spirit. the one feeling the documentaries left me with was the sadness that the nazis may not have taken away our way of life but thatcher managed to destroy the mines in the 80s and how different things are now. it was odd looking at that life that is only our grandparents' generation but to today's children must seem like the stone age. things are so so different now. its stupid to say everything is shit these days but the simple, gentle life of the people humphrey jennings shows makes you feel incredibly selfish and shallow and long for the past.
i didn't leave the cinema once i'd finished ushering but instead changed screen and went to cinema 2 for the BAD FILM CLUB: SNAKES ON A TRAIN. i was glad i'd got tickets for will and i and that our friend katy had got in since the cinema was packed, in fact bizarrely they had oversold the tickets. as i work in the box office i know that this is not possible to do unless something has gone very wrong! i think it was something about switching screens but nicko was surprised as anyone that they had sold out. clint did the commentary with her but it hardly needed any, it was a very stupid wonderfully bad film. the first 15 minutes was entirely in spanish which is fine but when they got on the train itself the characters spoke in english so that didn't even make any sense. a lot didn't make any sense. the main character was throwing up snakes and her boyfriend was keeping them in a jar. the reason he is doing this is because she has been cursed by her family. she "has snakes" is the explanation. riiiight. once on the train we meet some of the other, pointless cliched characters and their way of sort of spurring on the plot and we see a lot more snakes thrown up by this poor woman. at one point they have sort of overtaken her and this giant snake comes out of her or she becomes a giant snake or something and everyone jumps off the train just in time before she swallows the train whole. an amulet that was being used by her boyfriend finally comes in handy as it glows white and causes a huge tornado to swallow up the giant snake as if nothing happened. rubbish. it was so silly and ridiculous. nicko cleverly makes it seem like we've all been through this terrible experience together, taking you out of the usual film experience of sitting in the dark with the images coming into your head and turns it into almost a music hall style theatre show.
monday we were back in the cinema but this time for CHAPTER MOVIEMAKER for the premiere of two of the music videos we've worked on in the last few months. ryan owen and ben reed's work on RACE HORSES "cake" and ewan and casey (raymo)'s work on CATE LE BON's "hollow trees house hounds". they are both really good and very different from each other. race horses video is fun, featuring steen being hit in the face by a big cream cake and cate's is trippy and psychey with great mutant animations and you get to see me and my friends burn. the moviemaker is a strange little entity where all sorts of things are shown, from amateur shorts that people are trying out to professional films. we also saw the pilot of a tv show that didn't get picked up, a small documentary about a singer who was killed by pinochet's troups in chile and the new one from the fiction factory. afterwards we went for a drink with raymo and the gang but i was hideously broke and tired (i'd already spent far too much time in chapter over the last 72 hours) so went home to watch MEAN GIRLS instead and muse on the fact that lindsay lohan had the world at her feet and chucked it all for crack and hanging out with paris hilton.
tuesday i was ushering for one of michael kelligan's readings, this month it was the new patrick jones play DANDELION. it was a real treat as it was well acted and full of wonderful lines. the cast had the script in their hands but already seemed to know the characters really well. the setting was an old folks home where earnest is trying to rebel, get the old ladies thinking about the world around them. at times it felt a bit like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST when the characters talk about fleeing, but what to? this is a world that has finished with them. i thought it was a bit overlong, the romance element seeming to be a bit tacked on but it was wonderful and made you think about how we treat the elderly, especially after seeing MID AUGUST LUNCH.
on wednesday i was ushering for SLEEP FURIOUSLY again (wonderful every time but still makes me sleepy) and then was doing some cover for the cinema department in the evening. first up was the BAFTA PREVIEW SCREENING of THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. a little thrill of excitement went through me when i heard that this is what it was, i had hoped to see it at some point so it was nice to get to go to the preview. the september issue of vogue magazine is the most important of the year, one commentator said that it is like the new year for fashion, out with the old in with the new and everyone wants to know what the new is. what is new is partly determined by anna wintour, the editor of vogue. she and her team go around all the fashion shows and decide what the narratives of the collections are, what ideas are put forward and who should be showcased. anna wintour is a very powerful lady, many know her better as "nuclear wintour" for her icy demeanour. she is the person who they based the scary editor of the magazine in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, for years she has been a sort of archetype of fashion women and career women. this film gave her and her industry more depth and showed just what they do. someone who shone throughout the film was the magazine's stylist grace coddington. grace started at vogue at the same time as anna and the two know and respect each other a great deal, despite the odd disagreement about dropping pages from a photoshoot. grace is obviously very good at her job that she clearly loves and feels passionately about. to put it in a simplistic way grace is the beauty and anna is the brains but of course the truth is a lot more complicated than that. the film made the jobs of these people very important, almost seeming to be life or death but it also exposed how silly the whole thing is. a lot of the fashion industry seems to be like the emporers' new clothes. anna decides something is good so it is good and no-one questions her. they fuss and pout about these things (behind her back, to her face they just agree) but no-one challenges her. the one person allowed to challenge her was her daughter. in a bubble bursting moment she mentioned that her mother wants her to be an editor (to follow in the family tradition, anna's father was the editor of the evening standard) but she wants to be a lawyer as she finds it all a bit stupid, anna was not present for this interview. there was a real sadness about anna wintour that came out in the film. despite its protestations the commercial side of fashion tends to make people despise themselves and you got the feeling that its a profession that makes you in turn feel a bit worthless in the end. it was thrilling to be taken on this journey with them.
the next film was the epic MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS. i went to this not sure what to expect. i'd heard it was well respected and that paul schrader, george lucas and francis ford coppola all contributed to it in their early 80s heyday (part of their well known worship of japanese film and mythology) but that was all. it turned out to be a highly stylised facinating study of a man's life. again, i had heard of japanese writer yukio mishima but did not know the details. the film attempted to illuminate his life through his works, the chapters beauty "the temple of the golden pavillion", art "kyko's house", action "runaway horses" and the harmony between the pen and the sword which runs throughout the film and culminates in mishima's death by suicide. this film is so controversial in japan that it is officially banned, mishima's politics that hark back to the days of imperialism being too difficult to discuss. the film was interesting and intense and as an experiment in illustrating a man's life via his work it really worked. the famous score by phillip glass was just amazing and it was a thrill to be surrounded by those vivid colours and the escalating cascade of synths and strings. however, it did seem a little old fashioned and i was very aware all the way through that it was a film made by bunch of foreigners, i wasn't convinced that they were not too in love with the idea of mishima and took him a little too seriously. his politics and the way he lived his life made him seem very callous and petty at times.
i went home after that and will had bought a lovely bottle of wine and we drank and chatted happily, as we got to spend the next day together! we don't get many days off together since i work on a sunday. we both had thursday off and steen decided that since i'd been paid it was time for a bit of a day out so we went to penarth to see the new FFOTOGALLERY ANNA FOX: COCKROACH DIARIES show and did some charity shopping and had an ice cream on the pier. perfect! the exhibition was interesting, she lived in a shared house in london in the early 90s and documented the strange things previous tenants had left there or drawn on the walls and the infestation that reading the diary entries made her life seem not really a britpop era fun time but instead a few scenes from THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. we found some good bargains in the brilliant charity shops in town (i think we counted 6) including the FABER BOOK OF POP MUSIC, essays edited by hanif kareshi, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (a book i read and owned but left with another student in america), a hip flask and a brilliant bag covered with racing cars. i tried on a couple of dresses that didn't look right and steen tried on a coat that he didn't like but i loved (i took a photo of it to remind myself). we dashed back to cardiff to catch early orders at ICHIBAN.
we got back and played with the cat for a bit before i had to head back to chapter to usher for EMti, the new play from angharad evans by the real life theatre company. my friends cathryn and hef were planning to go and i was excited to see them but also dreading it, i'd seen the last play they'd put on and thought it was one of the worst things i'd seen: horribly pretentious and horrible acting. luckily, it wasn't as bad as that! they had a very good cast and the play was well put together. inspired by her own brother's suicide the play was about a young man struggling between an oppressive family and the release of death. apart from the unnecessary and frankly humourous "movement" from dominque fester (was she supposed to be an angel? i'm not sure, but her presence was intrusive and unhelpful) the scenes were powerful and grew increasingly intense. evans' work still suffers from the feeling that it could have been written by a younger more inexperienced playwright but here there was at least hope that the company will improve, the inclusion of other performers seemed to truly be a good path to take. i had a lovely drink with cathryn and hefin, it was lovely to see them again after so long.
friday i was ushering for MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1 (PART2). this was fairly annoying since i'd not yet seen part 1 but ho hum. it wasn't hard to follow. jacques mesrine was the most notorious gangster of the 70s in france, a charismatic self aggrandiser who liked being known as an "honest gangster" and even tried to style himself into a baader-meinhof revolutionary towards the end of his career. he wrote a book bragging of his deeds and gave interviews with the press to increase his notoriety and enjoyed the idea of being the number one hate figure with the police, thinking of himself as a modern day robin hood. although i've missed the first (and apparently better) half of the story, the central performance by vincent cassell made the whole thing very easy to follow, you were drawn to mesrine. you didn't know whether he would be loving and affectionate or murderous and frightening, i don't know many actors who could have pulled that off.
well, i end this week looking forward to maybe a night off from chapter. for all the wonderful things i get to do here i will be savouring a night in maybe just listening to music or reading. it is great to see it busy and full and we have such great shows here its well deserved. but it has been a busy week, as usual and i am looking forward to playing with the cat and being away for the evening.
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