back to the future

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!