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.
Seen The Reviews
Saturday 12 January 2008 Anthony McCall Serpentine Gallery
Light seems solid - drawn out of the dark with smoke that runs across its surfaces like oil on water. The viewers want to stand in it, touch it, waft through it, block it with their shadows. Eventually I find a position standing back against the wall where I can watch them - heads bobbing up through a surface like someone swimming under water and popping up occassionally, or fingers without bodies - while the light moves across me as the beam expands, moves or undulates like waves before they break. Marvellous. Would really like a look without anyone there.
I like Cate Blanchet. She has an other-worldliness that lets her sink into a role making her celebrity invisible. Quietly acting. I liked her first Elizabeth. And I liked this one. There was a sudden moment in the film when I felt incredibly sorry for her - as a queen, perceived higher than those around her, she is starved of human touch.
This film evokes the excitement of discovery of other worlds within our world, in an age which introduced the potato to England, of wars with our neighbours fought by men face to face rather than through computer game technologies, of barbaric treatment of enemies and criminals, poverty against wealth. And the loneliness of a monarch. Particularly a female monarch in a patriarchal society.
SH called me to ask me to go to see her favourite Wim Wenders film at the NFT. She sold it by telling me it was 3 hours long and nothing happens, apart from this one character having a shit (this obviously made a massive impression in such a dull movie). I wasn't doing anything so I thought I'd go along.
It was much better than I was thinking it was going to be from her description. Very 70s, shot in black and white. A blond man with a moustache is driving a big old truck round Germany town to town to fix cinema projectors. Lots of detail - he makes a coffee, starts to shave, changes his clothes. He's alone and perhaps overly comfortable with his own company. It was about his relationship with another man who he hooked up with after seeing him drive his beetle into a lake. Slowly, over time they started to talk to one another, trust each other, overcome the fact they were strangers. They had a good time together in a quiet way.
All the cinemas were either closing down or showing porn films - state of cinema, European cinema at the time. I don't remember it but my parents talk of there being 3 cinemas in walking distance of our flat when I was small - all but one of which have since shut down - people seemed to stop going to the movies for a while (perhaps it was TV, perhaps the recession - SH also said that the American film industry contributed heavily to the downfall of European cinema). We've gone back to the movies now - Wood Green can support 2 10 screen cinemas these days. The film was felt very provincial, backward even, only the men who were the main characters seemed modern, the houses, shops, petrol stations, etc all seemed like hangovers from the 50s - a place that wasn't keeping pace with modernisation.
Its been a long long time since I posted here. Its not that I haven't done anything or seen anything its just I got lazy about writing. Its a new year, I'm turning over a new leaf.