where you going? Nowhere who are you going with? No one when will you be back? Later
PREFACE
This is the sporadically updated blog of reviews by Harriet, author of In the Aquarium: a londoner's life.
I have kept the reviews separate to enable them to be indexed and therefore more easily accessible (see listing below).
FAVE FILMS DEAD MAN What an idea, the man is dying for almost the entire length of the film, the music is fantastic, its black and white, ideology, mythology, funny, sad, Johnny Depp sex god...
THE DRAFTMAN'S CONTRACT The first Peter Greenaway film I saw and possibly the most accessible. Beautiful set, costumes, direction. Fantastic soundtrack.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE I knew exactly what was going on right up until the last 15 minutes and damn it but then I lost it.
NIGHT ON EARTH Jim Jarmusch made the only film with Winona Ryder worth watching and it had Beatrice Dalle (say no more)
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? Roar out loud with laughter and tunes that make you love country music. My sister had to sneak out of the cinema ahead of our dad and me cos she was so embarrassed at our laughing.
ORLANDO Quiet, passionate, time travel.
PITCH BLACK Bails and I watched this with its bleached scenery and its whoar factor star. We LOVED him, Mr Diesel take a bow.
RESERVOIR DOGS Tight Tarantino gang heist gone wrong. Great soundtrack. And there's something about Michael Madson, dancing just before cutting off the cop's ear...
ROMUALD ET JULIETTE Truely lovely romance comedy.
THREE COLOURS TRILOGY Blue, White and Red. I liked them all. Quiet stories, beautifully shot.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS Its a story told. And the first time I saw it I didn't get the twist until just before it happened.
Invited to do a review of the Ship of Fools playing at the Theatre 503 in the Latchmere Pub in Battersea. I've never been there before.
Info said:
Two journeys, two sets of travellers, five hundred years apart.
1492.Basel. In a flash of inspiration the town council summons the city’s ‘fools’. Outcasts, handicapped, homosexuals and subversives are herded onto a ship with neither sail nor oar and floated down the Rhine into permanent exile.
2007. Britain. In a populist initiative, the government selects a group of long-term unemployed, bundles them onto a bus and drives them deep into the unknown to work for their dole.
Theatre was compact but a good space to see an intimate work. Feel very much in the work. Sweat and spittle of the actors. Every facial expression.
The stories from both centuries were intermingled to draw attention to the similarities of the way we treat the 'outcasts' of society. The transition of actors through time and cross roles was clear.
My main problem was with the message of the play. I wasn't clear what it was trying to say exactly. I thought initially that the town which set their degenerates off to sail unaided, without navigational tools, would be punished by the emissary sent by the pope to find out who was responsible for treating people with such disdain. By the end of the holy man was thoroughly discredited as a suppressed homosexual and the ship of fools found had worked their way through the full storming, forming, norming and performing team building stages - from total debauchery, anarchy, pillaging the church and towns for survival, to form a society that ran by its own rules on its own terms.
Were we supposed to believe that its ok to segregate our outcasts because they will find their own way of surviving apart from us and that prejudice doesn't really need to be faced head on.
Nicholas Garrigan seems naive and rather young to catch the attention of Idi Amin in quite the way it appears he did. Forrest Whitaker is outstanding as Idi - a strange mix of charm that wins you over and terrible temper with horrific outcome. Brief as it is on screen I can't get the vision of his tortured wife out my head. Taken from the doctor's point of view, the film skirted over much of the horror of what was actually going on in Uganda, clouded by his haze first of excitement, partying and finally fear.
February 2007 Notes on a Scandal Cineworld Haymarket
Its been an age since I wrote anything here but thats through laziness rather than not having seen anything. Sadly those things are past and I've missed them...
Good film. Left with a feeling that both parties weren't completely blameless. While Judi Dench's character was obviously a not-nice-person preying as she did on the vulnerability of others, Cate Blanchet's character provided the amunition by having an affair with a boy who she was teaching.
Serious difference in lifestyles of the two main characters - the bustle and vibrance of Cate Blanchet's family life in a huge house compared with the drab basement flat that Judi Dench lived in and her life with nothing in it but work. Unable to form appropriate relationships with others having spent far too long without meaningful personal relationships.
I like films with London in them - thsi was familiar territory - Archway Road, Suicide Bridge, Hampstead Heath, Highgate. But filmed in decidedly grey weather. Must have been January (aside: thank god January is over, it was really getting me down).
