Category: Films

Midsom­mar

Last night, I saw Midsom­mar, a film I’ve had my eye on for a while. It’s received very mixed reviews in the press, but I loved it. I felt it was pretty much what you’d get if you got Alex­an­der Jodorowsky to direct the Wick­er Man

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Microbe et Gasoil

I saw this recent Michel Gondry the other day. The Science of Sleep is one of my favour­ite films. Microbe et Gasoil is a lot more natur­al­ist­ic than a lot of his other films, but it still has a lot of the same little touches. Two misfit 14 year old boys decide to build their own car. When it turns out to not be road legal, they turn it into a shed on wheels and go on a very slow road-trip round rural France, in the spir­it of a Jacques Tati film. Lots of fun.

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2015

So now it’s 2015, the year of the future. I expect a fax to pop out of some­where unex­pec­ted any minute now. I had a very sedate and teetotal Christ­mas and New Year due to injur­ing my shoulder and then coming down with a bad case of the flu that lingered on forever. I wanted to get a few creat­ive projects finished over the Christ­mas break, but that put a span­ner in the works. Already this year I have star­ted a new job, been to Paris for a few days and turned 30.

The Phantom Toll­booth

I recently watched this docu­ment­ary about the Phantom Toll­booth, one of my favour­ite books when I was young­er. (I still have the same battered, dog-eared paper­back copy). Milo, the main char­ac­ter, is a boy who is always bored and doesn’t see the point in anything.

The Double

I went to see the Double a little while ago. My friend Ellina has thing about Jesse Eisen­berg and she wanted to see it. I haven’t been going to the cinema often enough recently. I like Dostoyevsky, enjoyed Submar­ine, and liked Jesse Eisen­berg as an unbear­able teen­age boy in the Squid and the Whale so it was a good choice. The film owes a lot to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but it’s defin­itely worth a watch.

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Making Tracks- live cinema

A little while ago my friend Erika Pál had the anim­a­tion she made for our MA show in Whir­li­gig Cinema’s Making Tracks fest­iv­al. She made record­ings of the students describ­ing dreams they’d had, and painstak­ingly created the anim­a­tion with oil paints on glass and time-lapse photo­graphy. Here she describes how she made it. She doesn’t have it avail­able to view online at the moment, so here are some stills from her website.

Febru­ary books and films

Not a great deal to report here, I haven’t read that much or seen many films because I’ve been busy doing unfun things. Less of that, please.

Books:

1) Lies My Teach­er Told Me: Everything Your Amer­ic­an History Text­book Got Wrong- James W Loewen

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Separado! Gruff Rhys ac y gaucho cymraeg

I finally saw this film today. I’d wanted to see it since I’d heard of its exist­ence, but not got round to it, but it was defin­itely worth the wait. Gruff Rhys from the Super Furry Anim­als saw a sing­er on Welsh tv in the 70s who used to go onstage wear­ing a poncho and riding a horse, and then sing flamenco and samba songs in Welsh with an Argen­tini­an accent, and he was spell­bound. His grand­moth­er told him it was René Grif­fiths, a distant uncle of his from South Amer­ica. An ancest­or of his in the 1800s joined the Welsh colony in Patago­nia after acci­dent­ally killing his cous­in in a rigged horse race.

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Films

I went to see two films at the BFI the past few weeks, both well worth seeing at the cinema rather than on dvd.

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Like the librar­i­an said … every­one respects the dead

Yester­day I got the dvd of Kids for £2, and I watched it with Vicky & Tukru. V had some­how never seen it, and the last time T had seen it was about 10 years ago when her down-with-the-kids history teach­er had played it at school (yeah, Finland …). When I was about 15 or so it was my all-time favour­ite film along with Heav­enly Creatures. I don’t know what that says about me. If I’d seen the film now as a 26 year old, it wouldn’t amaze me (maybe creep me out instead). I think what made the impact on me at the time was that in the age before cheap DVDs and easy down­load­ing, it was the first really raw film I’d seen, and I was obvi­ously long­ing for rawness at the time. Glossy Holly­wood high school films had abso­lutely no relev­ance to my life

Don’t Put Out

The other week I was in Brighton to see Ladies and Gentle­men the Fabulous Stains, a forgot­ten film from the 80s about a fiction­al all-girl punk band with Diane Lane, Ray Winstone (yes, really), Paul Simonon and half of the Sex Pistols. They’ve star­ted doing a cinema club at the West Hill Hall show­ing cult films with bands play­ing after­wards. This time the bands were Trash Kit and Woolf. I found out about it when I was at the copi­ers and the guy in front of me was copy­ing flyers and we got chat­ting and swapped zines and flyers. I wish that kind of thing happened to me more often. A good even­ing filled with friends and good feel­ings. Bands and film recom­men­ded. I want to be back in Brighton. ( I decided to go not via London to see if the cheap­er tick­et was worth the both­er- it wasn’t, it took me 4 hours and between 4-7 trains each way)