I deleted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from my PVR, but bits of it keep re-appearing.
Archive for the 'cinema' Category
It has been suggested that I and a colleague may have now become the Pete and Dud of our office. Tragically I have to admit that Doug probably makes a better Peter Cook than me, although that means he has to go through a couple of bitter divorces and spend his twilight years pretending to be a Swedish fisherman, while I have to develop a club foot and bed a succession of nubile young women. It’s a work in progress.
Anyway, the other day he was on top form. Somehow we were talking about languages which give nouns gender and he said that the moon is not always female - the closer to the equator you get the more likely the moon is to be male. I was amazed by this. “You could write a book about it” he said, generously offering me his idea, “one you get for Christmas with a fake old-style leather cover. Could even be a film. KENNETH BRANAGH is COPERNICUS!”.
Genius, up there with Andy’s “Robert Plant and the Seedlings” line. You read it here first. Hollywood here we come.
This is an excellent little film…
I think I’m the only person I know who likes Los Angeles.
And this cheered me up just now: quotes from the Steve Martin film LA Story.
For example:
Harris: Hello, this is Harris. I’m in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep.
[BEEP]
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Is this a person?
Harris: Yes, it is a person.
Despite two awful reviews and a lacklustre one, and Mark Kermode on The Culture Show (see! I don’t just watch it because of his co-presenter!) saying in effect they have (warning! contains spoilers!) jumped the shark by getting Mulder & Scully together… I went to see The X-Files: I Want to Believe last night.
Yes some of it is corny. Yes it is just like a long episode of the TV show. Yes you’d be forgiven for standing up, applauding and walking out at the point early on when Mulder says “I want to believe”. Yes, they may have jumped the shark by getting M&S together, spoiling the delicious unresolved sexual tension between them that kept us watching the TV show for so long - but if someone said to me “do you fancy watching a feature-length episode of The X-Files on the big screen in the Empire Leicester Square”, then the answer is “Hell, yes!”.
Flickr is down, so I’m forced to blog.
Ashes to Ashes is getting better and better. Two highlights this week: Gene Hunt looking at one point exactly like Martin Fry out of ABC (memo to self - get screengrab off AutoROT). And the line - which I have to say I saw coming - “Bugger Bognor”. These were supposedly the Famous Last Words of King George V, which I only know because Peter Greenaway used famous last words as a theme in Drowning by Numbers, hence the names of the Bognor bothers in the film.
By the way, I read somewhere that Moe Sizlack in the Simpsons is based on comedian Rich Hall. They do look identical, but this has to be a joke? Isn’t it?
Great movie double-bills that will never happen: Drowning by Numbers and Bugsy Malone. Alan Parker once said something about leaving the country if Peter Greenaway ever made any more films - always a bad move, threatening to leave the country. The words “don’t let the door slam you on the way out” always spring to mind. But I love both these movies.
I’ve had ‘Nannou’ by the Aphex Twin stuck in my head all day.
And I don’t even like the Aphex Twin. I think I heard one of his tracks once and hated it, and I used to snigger when the NME said “Congratulations, Mrs Aphex, it’s a twin!”
The soundtrack album to Morvern Callar changed that. Its plinky, plonky melodic genius closes the film and the album. And it’s wheedled its way into my brain.
I enjoyed the film of Movern Callar, but I’m enjoying the book much more. Reading it makes some of the decisions they made in adapting it seem very odd… I don’t recall Morvern crying at all at the start of the film, but she does in the book. And there are some arresting images in the book that I can’t believe they didn’t want to film - the model village and train set in the loft, the body crashing down on it, a man drinking whisky from the gullet of a fish… and why is Morvern English in the film? Why?!
I was going to write about asthma, but then realised that someone’s been there already and he can’t be beat.
For me, the poet of asthma is not Proust, it is not even Fedinand Mount.
It’s Bruce Robinson, in the introduction to the screenplay for the film he his famous for writing and directing:
Asthma struck in the middle of the night outside a little tin-roofed town called Macksville. A dash to the rusting hospital where they shoved me on a device to measure my air intake. The average breather hits around four hundred. I was coming up fourty-eight. Apparently a prospective corpse can produce about twenty-five with the fucking death rattle. Oxygen on and in go the needles, the latter featuring pure pharmaceutical adrenalin. Suddenly one’s heart is converted into a small diesel engine that could get a motorbike up a street at about fifty.
So there you are, the author of Withnail and I is the asthma poet. But not the ‘tomato poet’ which is the way to remember how to spell ‘onomatopoeia’.
This is the car driven by the woman who pulled into the parent and child space I was about to park in. She drove in at a sharp angle at quite high speed. Couldn’t see any children in her car. I had a very clingy 1 year-old in mine and I could have done with the space. I didn’t say anything of course. Just gave her, and her female companion, a Paddington Bear Hard Stare.
It was probably selfish of me to want that space. Probably selfish of me to have 3 children. I should slay them now to improve our family’s carbon footprint.
As you can tell, I’m in a good mood. I blame watching 28 Days Later back over two nights. Two nights ruined. Two nights alone staring into the abyss wondering if I could kill one of my children if they became infected with a zombie rage virus.
Okay, it’s only a film.
Incidentally, why does Danny Boyle always have to have insanely stupid things in his films that no-one mentions? In Shallow Grave I never understood why they just didn’t hide the money and call the police, turn the body in. And why did the coppers never notice all the holes in the ceiling? The holes! Look up, Sherlock!
In 28 Days Later, to be fair, they do say driving through the Rotherhithe Tunnel is an insanely stupid thing to do - but they still do it, driving over cars, bodies, rubble - and who’d'a’thunk it? They get a flat tyre! Also, assuming there is normal life going on beyond the shores of this infected isle, why can they not hear any European radio stations on Long Wave? I can hear several here in London. Why spend hours making beautifully perfect huge letters spelling ‘HELLO’ when ‘SOS’ would have done? Why… why… why?
I know. It’s only a film.
Is it just me, or is the animated film Polar Express a nasty piece of work?
I watched it at the in-laws last year on DVD - I may have had too much goose and port but it made me feel sick. And it’s now showing in 3D at the IMAX cinema at Waterloo - that’s a great way to screw up your kids’ Christmas.
There’s just something sinister about it, and not sinister in a good way. Just bleak and scary with no shred of comfort. And not great to look at, either. Give me any old adaptation of A Christmas Carol, give me that cartoon of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, but above all give me The Amazing Mr Blunden.
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