this week was marked like a hot brand on the skin by our part in the casey and ewan (hereby to be known as raymo) directed video for CATE LE BON. it was the hottest week of the year so far, the sort of weather people leapt into wearing nothing but shorts and people in offices complained about the lack of air conditioning. our working environment was the llofft theatre space above the chapter cafe bar with blacked out windows and at least 4 500 watt hallogen bulb lights at any given time. with no fan. if this was a professional production everyone would have sued! but it was casey and ewan, top creative minds of our time and we gave our time freely and happily, because its far more fun than anything else we do normally. poor cate, she gave birth to an egg, attacked by tree people, raped by a monster and her head pulled off and then lynched by an angry mob. a friend of mine came upstairs to help at one point and said i looked completely calm and at home. i was, i love all this stuff, its what i imagined myself doing when i was a kid. things being what they were and the little twists i took to veer off this path i've ended up doing something different but its always nice being back in that atmosphere where saying things like "i think we should move her eyeball to the right a little more" seem completely normal. we did our normal work and then dashed upstairs to help out till about 11pm from monday and friday and usually got a pint in at the end of the evening. a bloody brilliant way to spend a working week.
other things i did that week that was exciting was attend lots of CHAPTER meetings. this may sound dull to some but it was to discuss moving back to the other side of the building and all that entails: very exciting indeed! our visual arts director, hannah firth, gave us a presentation on the interior design she, angela giddens and marc rees had co-designed (old school) and we saw the finalised signage (neon neon!) and we talked about all that needed to be done. as soon as we move back we have arts festivals WONDERCULTURE and MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES and then hot on their heels is SWN festival and EXPERIMENTICA. the capacity is going to be huge, a real leap from what we have now (currently at about 200 we will have capacity for 660 in the new concourse) so its important we do a lot of planning. it was revealed that we will also have far more commissioned spaces for art and the idea of what it is going to be like just made my stomach bubble with joy.
on the friday we said goodbye to the raymo team to attend the JOY COLLECTIVE benefit gig in aid of the hospice that looked after jonny's dad when he was dying. it was an opportunity to go to TJ'S and see FUTURE OF THE LEFT and jonny's new band SCIENCE BASTARD. it was very odd going into tjs again. i worked out that i hadn't been there since 1997 when we shot the catatonia video mulder and scully in the xmas break from uni. that is 12 years ago. frightening. it hadn't changed much, apart from the wall to the quiet room moving a bit and the toilets relocated, it had the same feel. i was flashbacking all over the place. NINJA NINJA were on first, they were ok. deans and steen did not like them but i thought they were all right, they seemed to need a bit more practice. SCIENCE BASTARD were full of energy and good fun but the night truly belonged to FUTURE OF THE LEFT, they really are so good live. kelson stage dived at one point and was playing his bass whilst being held up by the crowd. it was a strange contrast that the last time i'd been in there kevin allen, the director of the catatonia video staged a stage dive with cerys that took many attempts to muster into looking like the real thing.
on the sunday we had a film day, since i was ushering for the ken loach season. we saw LOOKING FOR ERIC followed by KES. it was interesting to see how much and how little his style had changed over the years. everyone's seen (and been traumatised by) kes, its up there with WATERSHIP DOWN with one of those films you saw when you were a kid that made you cry your eyes out and this wasn't even accompanied by art garfunkel crooning comfort over the credits. it was odd to look back at the 70s in a very real way, without some bouncy voiceover telling you how great spacehoppers were. some people in the older part of my generation than me had taken their tween children to watch it and it suddenly made me feel very old. i remember things looking like that, i remember that life, if a little distantly and dreamlike, but to them it must seem like how things were in victorian times. it is such a true picture of how brutal things were, the children were as wild as the animals, loach seemed to be portraying human society as a lie of civilisation. it may be my age, but it feels like everything is mapped out that children are never allowed outside on their own to play, their every moment is monitored, closing in on their imagination. LOOKING FOR ERIC was in contrast to that, quite a feelgood movie. it begins with postman eric having a panic attack. his life is at a turning point, his partner has left him and his first wife, lily is back in contact through their grandchild and the remembering of how he screwed up the first time has him reeling. added to this he has two very lazy, abusive, drug taking teenage stepsons that somehow he has ended up solely responsible for. seeking guidance in his life he takes some of the eldest's weed and tries to calm down, in the process hallucinating eric cantona. cantona gives mysterious gallic advice but as most good counsellors tend to do, he lets eric the postman work things out for himself. it was a delightful film, about being and becoming a man, from the teenage sons' maturation and veering away from false idols and how if working class men became better at expressing themselves and learning to deal with their responsibilities. it was also a relief that it was not as depressing as some loach films can be.
to get completely over the hot week we went to the BAD MOVIE CLUB to see lindsey lohan in I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. nicko warned us it was bad. she even said it was worse than THE SWARM. "pah!" i declared, "nothing is worse than the swarm". i was wrong. at least the swarm made some sort of internal sense. it was stoopid but didn't make you go "whaaa?". the plot is such: lindsey lohan is an ordinary middle class virginal teen called aubrey and in her town is a serial killer who lobs off bits of teens then leaves them for dead. one day she goes missing. we see lots of horrific footage of her limbs being frozen off, hacked into by bits of fancy sculptured blue glass and then she is found at the side of the road. when she awakes she tells the doctors and her family she is not aubrey but dakota, her twin. the only way to see this movie is in the company of the bad movie club. i was laughing my socks off. nicko and joe's gaffawing at some of the terrible terrible lines and gaping plot holes made it all worth it. the plot barely made sense and the twist at the end just made you go "no way!". a brilliant way to end the week.
Showing posts with label cate le bon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cate le bon. Show all posts
28 Jun 2009
30 May 2009
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!
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!
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