this week has mainly be filled with death, not an immediate member of the family (although my dog, fender sadly died last week) but during my cinema ushering shifts. through a cruel twist of fate i was ushering for BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA and then KATYN three times in one week. by the end of this week all i want to do is watch comedies.
the BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA was part of SCREEN SCHOOL. i'd not seen it but heard it was about kids who create a magical world. it was a lot less cgi laden than i had feared, the story mainly focussing on two bullied kids becoming friends and then going into the forest to build a treehouse and explore a make believe world they had created, their foes and heroes are clearly very real. it meandered along perfectly ok, a bit cheesey for me, but then i'm not 10 years old, it pleased me that the girls were ballsy and the situation seemed real. but was shocked at the end when *SPOILER ALERT* the little girl died! the kid came back from a museum visit to find his best friend dead! i thought he'd go to their magical place and she'd be there after all but she wasn't! the kids seemed to deal with this better than me. i spoke to the lecturer wynn thomas who said he'd chosen it because it was a mature film that would teach them about script writing and story.
the next day i was in for the long haul. i had a double shift of polish film KATYN, which i was also down for on my wednesday afternoon shift. it is the story of how the soviets killed 12,000 polish officers in world war two and blamed the nazis, the truth only coming out in the 1990s when peristroika open up the records. the majority of the army was made up of reservists: lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors; people who were needed to rebuild poland after the war so stalin decided that they were too valuable to live, that to increase the sense of chaos the soviet government could control he needed to execute them. director andrejz wadja is in his eighties and his father was one of those officers who just "disappeared", his mother believed till the day she died that one day he would come back to them and he wanted to tell the story of the massacre and the lie. the film expertly does both of these, showing a handful of families who lose people and try to cling on to some semblance of the truth. i suppose it is a kind of polish version of SCHINDLER'S LIST but without the hope at the end of escapees. anyone connected to the story who knew the truth was made to keep quiet or taken to the gulag for imprisonment or murdered. i was in pieces all three times. i kept thinking, "how do you explain this to children?" "how can we explain these crimes?" "why are they allowed to continue in countries like rwanda?" i was in a spin all week. some scenes were so painfully and brutally beautiful: the smoke obscuring the view in the first scene where the country becomes invaded on two sides; the washing away of the bloody in the factory-line style asassination chamber; the sandy earth being bulldozed over the bodies in the mass grave; the blank pages of the diary after the death of the officers.
i was very glad to get to work with casey and ewan again, to escape from there. i went to the museum where they were filming the rapey monster scenes. it sounds dark but was in fact wonderfully funny, i have had many ed wood moments on this shoot. mainly i was helping leah do some clean up and wrangling one of the reds behind the monster in the cave. there were museum staff on hand who were very helpful and nice. on a monday, when the museum is closed they do a stock take to make sure things haven't been tampered with and need to leave all the lights and videos running so it was wonderfully surreal being in the fibre glass cave and hearing a disembodied voice on a loop telling me about the ice age. every so often casey's voice directing chrissy the rapey monster would be drowned out by the woosh of the wind and the roar of a wooly mammouth. it was great! but we got very wet on the way home. i clearly need to re-waterproof my waterproof coat.
since the weather was so awful we spent a lot of nights in and i kept hankering for escape: romantic comedies, silly films. i made steen watch SINGING IN THE RAIN against his will but i think he quite enjoyed it. i laugh at donald o'connor's mugging in "make em laugh" and swoon at gene kelly every time i see it but i think steen was a bit bored. musical hater! the peak of silly films was reached on sunday night after getting back from work and finding brit com CONFETTI on tv. i was flicking around and saw the bloke that isn't david mitchell from MITCHELL AND WEBB with his knob out and kept watching. as it was bbc there were no adverts to break the spell and i ended up watching the whole thing. it was very high concept, a wedding magazine does a special on unusual weddings and pits three obsessions against each other to win a dream home: naturists, tennis and musicals. the musicals are clearly going to win the prize all the way through and the tennis pair were horrible and quite funny but the naturists were really sweet and nice and i really wanted them to win. steen didn't watch this with me but he said later he'd seen it in the cinema to see the lady from PEEP SHOW with her clothes off, so i found it funny that we'd been drawn to it for similar reasons.
another way to shake off the horror of the 20th century was pure escapism in the form of HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. i have no shame in liking harry potter, it doesn't make me an idiot and it doesn't make me a weirdo goth doing reenactment dressing up like a witch, either. i read the first book from a recommendation to keep my brain reading something light when i was on a break in the middle of my final exams at uni and quite enjoyed it. its not serious, its a kids book. you do get drawn in but i get drawn in by all sorts of things (archers plotlines, for example) but i'm not about to start calling actors by their character names in the street or anything. sorry if i sound defensive, i've had 10 years of ridicule. anyway, the film was all right. i wouldn't really care too much if it wasn't, i just want to see how it looks in someone else's head. i still have a problem with harry and hermione, in my head they were nowhere near as posh sounding as they are on screen but there we are, generally its very close to the book, the only one i've really hated has been the first one cos it was chris columbus directing and i find his stuff overly glossy, sluggish, mawkish, generally many kinds of "ish".
to finish off my week i've been reading jane fondas' autobiography MY LIFE SO FAR. i meant to go and see her speak at hay festival a couple of years ago when this came out, i've always liked jane fonda (stemming from a childhood obsession with BARBARELLA) and although its chocablock with californian therapy speak its really very candid and an good read. she's an interesting lady who has lived an interesting life. ah, well a week later since all that began i'm starting to feel a little heavy with the weight of all that history but i am very glad i was able to see KATYN.
Showing posts with label screen school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screen school. Show all posts
17 Jul 2009
10 Jul 2009
moving in, moving up
the week started well, with another adventure to bristol. it was a dark and stormy night, the weather had broken at last and it broke with aplomb. after all this hot weather it felt almost pleasant to be in a thunder storm by the sea, it feels very appropriate looking out of the portholes in a boat on a night like this. we were in the THEKLA to see ST VINCENT on the promotional tour for her new album, "actor". the thekla is a wonderful venue for intimate gigs and it was with a bubble of excitement that we went downstairs to discover a wall of warm noise from THIS IS MY NORMAL STATE. going down the harsh metal steps of the boat was like descending into a different realm, the echoing vocals pulling you into a subterranean world. the female japanese singer on stage sang trance-like, channelling the stylings of sigur ros accompanied by a cellist and grungey guitar loops. it was a magical moment and when they finished and the lights came up i felt like i had been woken up from a blurry dream. for the first band on to have this effect is rare and precious and made me curiously excited for what was to come. a couple of cans of strongbow was to come next, folllowed by the beautiful psyche folk of BLUE ROSES. she seemed nervous as she took the stage but the nerves slipped away when she began playing, first on the piano and then acoustic guitar. these were hypnotic, meaningful songs with dreamy melodies sometimes harmonised with her violinist but often alone, speaking to a spurned lover with sorrow and hope. a little wait for ST VINCENT and we're getting anxious. bristol is a great place, with a great number of venues and ace promoters but a shit train timetable. its pushing 10pm and we're going to have to leave at 10.40pm to get the last train. people get on stage and get off stage, she is testing the mics from off stage so a disembodied annie clark voice trills over the dj. and we wait. this is not her fault but it does mean that we miss the end of her set as she doesn't come on till 10.15pm. arse. but what we do see is an amazing musician playing around with vocoders and effects pedals without detracting from the powerful melodies that have you humming her songs down the street for weeks. live she comes off as far warmer than the porcelain, chastising voice that dominates her album "marry me". i was expecting someone far more poised and cold but found her friendly and coltish on stage. she engaged with the audience to the extent that she turned her routine into a impromptu stand up routine when technical difficulties struck. standouts from the set were the powerful "now, now" the sarcastic "marry me" and the mesmerizing "the strangers". turning to run for the train with pained expressions on our faces we will definitely be catching ST VINCENT and indeed everyone on the bill, next time they come to town.
tuesday was PANEL 9 FROM OUTER SPACE day! the boys from the DRONES comedy club in CHAPTER (whom i never get to see cos i'm always downstairs in the other bar) have a panel game and it is a lot of fun. clint, dan and laura bryon are the regulars and joined by guest comics, this month being spencer mcgarry, huw evans and some bloke also called dan (who i thought was rubbish but turned out to be dan glyn who is very famous for doing a very good kids programme on s4c - maybe he's a better writer than performer...). as with most comedy its pointless telling you how good it was without telling you the jokes, which always sound awful when written down and repeated. rest assured, it was a good time and i laughed a lot. huw tended to whitter on about peados, spencer was a comedy natural (he's like this in real life, i can vouch for his comedy chops) and clint was sardonic as always. my friend anwen even got to win a book that from the front cover looked like bill bailey in a hitchhikers' guide scenario.
wednesday i ushered for FRENCH FILM, a sub-richard curtis "comedy" that wasted wonderful acting talents with its poor script. the story is of an urbane posh london journalist is doing a piece on a director of romantic french films and it makes him think about the romance in his own life. everyone in this film (whether they are employed or not) seems to have very swish apartments in the heart of london with gardens and well designed furniture. they partner swap and the urbane journalist talks a lot. remind you of someone? this whole plot could have been lifted from a woody allen but the silly "oh arn't we everso english, it'll turn out in the end" script was pure richard curtis and also reminded me of THIS YEARS LOVE and that spate of sub-FOUR WEDDINGS films that came out in the 90s. it was pretty dire. the cast were very good: hugh bonneville, anne marie duff, douglas henshall, victoria hamilton in the lead roles and it seemed to me to be such a shame that we're still making films like this. some moments in the film i could just see the script written in front of me, which is obviously a very bad sign. the saving grace was eric cantona playing the film director that the journalist is obsessed with, he seemed to be the only one having fun.
thursday was will's day off work that week so we did a blitz on the house. will moved in at the start of the month but the first week we were busy with casey's video and this was the first day we'd had to really put stuff away properly. when he temporarily lived with me last year we kept stuff here so there was just cds and a few books to put up and clothes. ah yes, the clothes. i already have too many clothes and two wardrobes (comes of filling up two wardrobes in my previous house) so we had to do some moving around of furniture to make room for more storage. we mostly just put amalgomated our badge collection and put these badges on a curtain. lazy! but it was an enjoyable job and got us talking about other things we were going to change around. very exciting! in the early evening we made a tasty italian style pasta meal with lots of red wine. then continued to drink the bottle and another. then went to the FUWCH GOCH POP QUIZ and drank another bottle each. wankered. i haven't been so drunk since, um, the last pop quiz. we came third AGAIN! and went to DEMPSEYS for afters but still had loads of fun apart from the guilt at realising that i'd given a couple of wrong answers (in the picture round mistook miles davis' bitches brew for miles smiles and said it was the doors' la woman instead of strange days. ooooh the shame). i felt awful but happy the next day. the next two days in fact. ooof. i had some great soup in CHAPTER on the friday for lunch which perked me up, a very creamy tomato. you know when you taste something and it seems like the best thing you've ever tasted? well, that was my experience and rounded the week off nicely.
tuesday was PANEL 9 FROM OUTER SPACE day! the boys from the DRONES comedy club in CHAPTER (whom i never get to see cos i'm always downstairs in the other bar) have a panel game and it is a lot of fun. clint, dan and laura bryon are the regulars and joined by guest comics, this month being spencer mcgarry, huw evans and some bloke also called dan (who i thought was rubbish but turned out to be dan glyn who is very famous for doing a very good kids programme on s4c - maybe he's a better writer than performer...). as with most comedy its pointless telling you how good it was without telling you the jokes, which always sound awful when written down and repeated. rest assured, it was a good time and i laughed a lot. huw tended to whitter on about peados, spencer was a comedy natural (he's like this in real life, i can vouch for his comedy chops) and clint was sardonic as always. my friend anwen even got to win a book that from the front cover looked like bill bailey in a hitchhikers' guide scenario.
wednesday i ushered for FRENCH FILM, a sub-richard curtis "comedy" that wasted wonderful acting talents with its poor script. the story is of an urbane posh london journalist is doing a piece on a director of romantic french films and it makes him think about the romance in his own life. everyone in this film (whether they are employed or not) seems to have very swish apartments in the heart of london with gardens and well designed furniture. they partner swap and the urbane journalist talks a lot. remind you of someone? this whole plot could have been lifted from a woody allen but the silly "oh arn't we everso english, it'll turn out in the end" script was pure richard curtis and also reminded me of THIS YEARS LOVE and that spate of sub-FOUR WEDDINGS films that came out in the 90s. it was pretty dire. the cast were very good: hugh bonneville, anne marie duff, douglas henshall, victoria hamilton in the lead roles and it seemed to me to be such a shame that we're still making films like this. some moments in the film i could just see the script written in front of me, which is obviously a very bad sign. the saving grace was eric cantona playing the film director that the journalist is obsessed with, he seemed to be the only one having fun.
thursday was will's day off work that week so we did a blitz on the house. will moved in at the start of the month but the first week we were busy with casey's video and this was the first day we'd had to really put stuff away properly. when he temporarily lived with me last year we kept stuff here so there was just cds and a few books to put up and clothes. ah yes, the clothes. i already have too many clothes and two wardrobes (comes of filling up two wardrobes in my previous house) so we had to do some moving around of furniture to make room for more storage. we mostly just put amalgomated our badge collection and put these badges on a curtain. lazy! but it was an enjoyable job and got us talking about other things we were going to change around. very exciting! in the early evening we made a tasty italian style pasta meal with lots of red wine. then continued to drink the bottle and another. then went to the FUWCH GOCH POP QUIZ and drank another bottle each. wankered. i haven't been so drunk since, um, the last pop quiz. we came third AGAIN! and went to DEMPSEYS for afters but still had loads of fun apart from the guilt at realising that i'd given a couple of wrong answers (in the picture round mistook miles davis' bitches brew for miles smiles and said it was the doors' la woman instead of strange days. ooooh the shame). i felt awful but happy the next day. the next two days in fact. ooof. i had some great soup in CHAPTER on the friday for lunch which perked me up, a very creamy tomato. you know when you taste something and it seems like the best thing you've ever tasted? well, that was my experience and rounded the week off nicely.
25 Jun 2009
the big unsleep
this week has been hot. hot and bright. i've been waking up at about 5am wide awake then falling asleep just before i have to get up. very annoying. monday passed by quite nicely, played with the cat after work then fell asleep in the garden and almost missed the FUTURE OF THE LEFT live instore performance in SPILLERS. i felt a bit groggy when i got there and found it packed full of people and airless. i found steen who was stood just behind matt and jonny (from JOY COLLECTIVE) and charlotte and jamie were next to me, a good placing. i tried to fend off fainting by waving my photomarathon topic card for the next half hour or so. they did 6 songs i think and it was very good. i especially liked the song "mark foley was right" cos he tends to be. i'm warming to future of the left. i thought they were great the first time i saw them (i think it was their first gig too) but never seemed to be in the mood for them since, which sounds like a complete diss but i always seemed to be doing something else when they were playing. it was good to see them here to remind myself that they are actually really good. apparently my friend james is moving into a house with falkous and matt, which will be the most cynical house of disgruntled males in cardiff, i can't wait to visit!
afterwards we went and had some tea in CHAPTER and went to see SYNECDOCHE, NY, the new charlie kaufman film. i was incredibly excited about this, dismissing the cries i've vaguely heard from the press about it being indulgent. ha! he's allowed to be indulgent, he's a genius, thought i. i was wrong. it was a mess. i started off enjoying it, gleefully noting that everyone in the cast list at the beginning was amazing (dianne wiest! catherine keener! jennifer jason leigh! phillip seymore hoffman!) and halfway through was longing for it to end. its the story of a writer in an unhappy marriage who starts writing a great masterwork on his life and that is all you can describe it as really. it is a valiant effort, in a way, he's trying to redefine film language, it is as massive an opus as the play the character is writing, trying to understand himself by getting it all played out in front of him, his personal life seems out of control so he tries to take control over it by reimaginging it on stage. a good effort but it didn't work for me. it felt like unfunny woody allen and just became a big sprawl of characters and went on a bit long. i understood where he was trying to get to but i felt like he needed a filter of some kind, someone to tell him where to stop. by the umpteenth time someone new was becoming his wife / daughter / assistant i just thought it would never end. a shame, but a grand shame which is the most interesting so not a waste of time.
wednesday i met some friends lou and rich from AMBERCOUCH for an exciting business meeting, we're thinking of starting a website. i came up with an idea a couple of years ago and asked how much it is to get a website and dismissed the idea for being ridiculously expensive but now they say it may be done! wow! we're doing research on it now, a sort of cardiff version of BUY OLYMPIA, one of my all time favourite websites. finding out if we can get grants, my time won't really be wasted but lou and rich's is a bit more precious since they'll be doing the actual work.
after that i went to usher for O'HORTEN, a norweigan film about a lonely train driver who has just retired and has to find something to do with his life. it was a wonderful, beautiful film. it could have been really depressing and sad, about the uselessness of retired life but instead it gives horten the chance to forge relationships with people and live for the first time in his life. the scenery when he was driving his train around the mountains and snowscapes was breathtaking and made me determined to try and do the train journey around europe steen and i have been talking about.
i zipped off to PULSE to buy some much needed toms of maine deodorant, soap pods for the laundry, kingfisher toothpaste and all those useful hippie things i am about to run out of and saw the lovely marc roberts and rob kennedy and morgan hall in there, a proper chapter away from chapter! then zipped back to chapter to see THE BIG SLEEP. i missed the raymond chandler talk last week but was determined to see this one, a big favourite. it was amazing to see it on a big screen. i'd forgotten the script was written by william faulkner till he came up on screen in the credits and its evident in some of the scenes, the first one with the general and marlowe, any with bogey and bacall... it crackles. the villains seem genuinely sleazy, the grime reaching all the way up to the upper class in hollywood. wonderful.
thursday i was entirely lazy. i caught up on some sleep by having a proper lay in and did lots of laundry (still trying to get through stuff from when the cat had fleas last week) and stayed in my dressing gown till about 3pm. at 6pm i got picked up by rob to be taken with will to bristol to THE CUBE cinema where we were going to watch "introduction to japanese sex films". we got some food first in CAFE KINO, a co-operative place which was basically exactly what sort of business i want to run when i grow up. it had all these little touches, all very much home-made and BOOK CROSSING posters (leave a book, post in a book crossing pamphlet and then it can be tracked every time someone new reads and then leaves it). the food we had in there was amazing, i had a spicy bean burger with amazing thick cut chips and steen had falafel. we dashed over to the cube, worried we'd be late but they're so laid back there it didn't start for another half an hour. i love it in the cube, we keep saying we'll have to go more often, if it wasn't for the shite cardiff-bristol train service i think we'd go every week. everyone (staff and customers) were sat outside having an impromptu bbq and chatting and drinking, very relaxed then we went in and was introduced to the film by a nice man called jasper sharp who has written a book about PINKU EIGA, the japanese sex film industry. the perimetres are quite tight: its 1 hour, budget of £20,000, at least 1 sex scene every 20 minutes and no pubes or real genital parts but apart from that you can do anything. the first film we saw was A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN, a rather sweet film about a farmer whose son has died and lives with his widowed daughter in law. he has gone a bit senile and gets up every morning to milk his favourite cow who has died so she pretends to be the cow. they love each other but feel they can't express their love and its really quite romantic. the second was SEXY BATTLE GIRLS, an altogether less sweet, more funny film about a schoolgirl whose father has installed a device in her vagina to exact revenge upon the man who stole her mother away from them. neither film was particuarly sexy, too much tit grabbing and the second film had a bit of tying up women to torture stuff in it which i found a bit uncomfortable to watch but it was more benny hill than anything else, just silly. afterwards we had a chat with jasper about how films like SHORTBUS are banned and yet art films can get away with loads of sex and how the cube got the most e-mails for showing these films than anything else recently. many famous political japanese directors got their starts on the pinku eigas as they could explore all kinds of themes without them needing to be commercial.
saturday morning i was ushering for the SCREEN SCHOOL showing DICK TRACY. i was a little disappointed with the selection and i presume the children were too, from the way they dashed out of the cinema like it was on fire once i'd said they could leave. i'd not seen it before, my family didn't really go to the cinema when i was a kid so i'd not got around to seeing it before. it was too much of an ego led production and very dated. it was like warren beatty saying "look who my mates are, i can get dustin hoffman and al pacino in loads of prosthetic make up!" the acting was baaaad and the cartoon style looked terrible compared to comic book adaptations like SIN CITY. the only high spot were the madonna songs. i played the I'M BREATHLESS album over and over and over so had expectations that there would be songs all the way through and i knew all the words, but no, it didn't even show off the songs by madonna, which in those days was a big deal. madonna was predictably terrible, its funny how you forget how bad she is. she is really really bad. this film was hardly even enjoyable and it made me curious to see what they're going to be saying in their feedback session next week, can't wait for that. "sir, this is shit, can we see more buster keaton?" maybe? i only hope.
afterwards we went and had some tea in CHAPTER and went to see SYNECDOCHE, NY, the new charlie kaufman film. i was incredibly excited about this, dismissing the cries i've vaguely heard from the press about it being indulgent. ha! he's allowed to be indulgent, he's a genius, thought i. i was wrong. it was a mess. i started off enjoying it, gleefully noting that everyone in the cast list at the beginning was amazing (dianne wiest! catherine keener! jennifer jason leigh! phillip seymore hoffman!) and halfway through was longing for it to end. its the story of a writer in an unhappy marriage who starts writing a great masterwork on his life and that is all you can describe it as really. it is a valiant effort, in a way, he's trying to redefine film language, it is as massive an opus as the play the character is writing, trying to understand himself by getting it all played out in front of him, his personal life seems out of control so he tries to take control over it by reimaginging it on stage. a good effort but it didn't work for me. it felt like unfunny woody allen and just became a big sprawl of characters and went on a bit long. i understood where he was trying to get to but i felt like he needed a filter of some kind, someone to tell him where to stop. by the umpteenth time someone new was becoming his wife / daughter / assistant i just thought it would never end. a shame, but a grand shame which is the most interesting so not a waste of time.
wednesday i met some friends lou and rich from AMBERCOUCH for an exciting business meeting, we're thinking of starting a website. i came up with an idea a couple of years ago and asked how much it is to get a website and dismissed the idea for being ridiculously expensive but now they say it may be done! wow! we're doing research on it now, a sort of cardiff version of BUY OLYMPIA, one of my all time favourite websites. finding out if we can get grants, my time won't really be wasted but lou and rich's is a bit more precious since they'll be doing the actual work.
after that i went to usher for O'HORTEN, a norweigan film about a lonely train driver who has just retired and has to find something to do with his life. it was a wonderful, beautiful film. it could have been really depressing and sad, about the uselessness of retired life but instead it gives horten the chance to forge relationships with people and live for the first time in his life. the scenery when he was driving his train around the mountains and snowscapes was breathtaking and made me determined to try and do the train journey around europe steen and i have been talking about.
i zipped off to PULSE to buy some much needed toms of maine deodorant, soap pods for the laundry, kingfisher toothpaste and all those useful hippie things i am about to run out of and saw the lovely marc roberts and rob kennedy and morgan hall in there, a proper chapter away from chapter! then zipped back to chapter to see THE BIG SLEEP. i missed the raymond chandler talk last week but was determined to see this one, a big favourite. it was amazing to see it on a big screen. i'd forgotten the script was written by william faulkner till he came up on screen in the credits and its evident in some of the scenes, the first one with the general and marlowe, any with bogey and bacall... it crackles. the villains seem genuinely sleazy, the grime reaching all the way up to the upper class in hollywood. wonderful.
thursday i was entirely lazy. i caught up on some sleep by having a proper lay in and did lots of laundry (still trying to get through stuff from when the cat had fleas last week) and stayed in my dressing gown till about 3pm. at 6pm i got picked up by rob to be taken with will to bristol to THE CUBE cinema where we were going to watch "introduction to japanese sex films". we got some food first in CAFE KINO, a co-operative place which was basically exactly what sort of business i want to run when i grow up. it had all these little touches, all very much home-made and BOOK CROSSING posters (leave a book, post in a book crossing pamphlet and then it can be tracked every time someone new reads and then leaves it). the food we had in there was amazing, i had a spicy bean burger with amazing thick cut chips and steen had falafel. we dashed over to the cube, worried we'd be late but they're so laid back there it didn't start for another half an hour. i love it in the cube, we keep saying we'll have to go more often, if it wasn't for the shite cardiff-bristol train service i think we'd go every week. everyone (staff and customers) were sat outside having an impromptu bbq and chatting and drinking, very relaxed then we went in and was introduced to the film by a nice man called jasper sharp who has written a book about PINKU EIGA, the japanese sex film industry. the perimetres are quite tight: its 1 hour, budget of £20,000, at least 1 sex scene every 20 minutes and no pubes or real genital parts but apart from that you can do anything. the first film we saw was A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN, a rather sweet film about a farmer whose son has died and lives with his widowed daughter in law. he has gone a bit senile and gets up every morning to milk his favourite cow who has died so she pretends to be the cow. they love each other but feel they can't express their love and its really quite romantic. the second was SEXY BATTLE GIRLS, an altogether less sweet, more funny film about a schoolgirl whose father has installed a device in her vagina to exact revenge upon the man who stole her mother away from them. neither film was particuarly sexy, too much tit grabbing and the second film had a bit of tying up women to torture stuff in it which i found a bit uncomfortable to watch but it was more benny hill than anything else, just silly. afterwards we had a chat with jasper about how films like SHORTBUS are banned and yet art films can get away with loads of sex and how the cube got the most e-mails for showing these films than anything else recently. many famous political japanese directors got their starts on the pinku eigas as they could explore all kinds of themes without them needing to be commercial.
saturday morning i was ushering for the SCREEN SCHOOL showing DICK TRACY. i was a little disappointed with the selection and i presume the children were too, from the way they dashed out of the cinema like it was on fire once i'd said they could leave. i'd not seen it before, my family didn't really go to the cinema when i was a kid so i'd not got around to seeing it before. it was too much of an ego led production and very dated. it was like warren beatty saying "look who my mates are, i can get dustin hoffman and al pacino in loads of prosthetic make up!" the acting was baaaad and the cartoon style looked terrible compared to comic book adaptations like SIN CITY. the only high spot were the madonna songs. i played the I'M BREATHLESS album over and over and over so had expectations that there would be songs all the way through and i knew all the words, but no, it didn't even show off the songs by madonna, which in those days was a big deal. madonna was predictably terrible, its funny how you forget how bad she is. she is really really bad. this film was hardly even enjoyable and it made me curious to see what they're going to be saying in their feedback session next week, can't wait for that. "sir, this is shit, can we see more buster keaton?" maybe? i only hope.
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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