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How did a concrete campus monstrosity such as the Brunswick Centre ever lurk so long in the heart of Bloomsbury without my noticing it? This city doesn't give up her secrets easily, that's for sure.
I was there to see Performance. Last time I saw this was about a decade ago, on a sofa in Derby, when I was still somewhere within view of innocence, and it all seemed dreadfully exotic. This time around the comedy was more apparent. I don't just mean the line, to Mick Jagger ashimselfTurner, "Comical little geezer, intcha? You'll look funny when you're fifty." (Though admittedly that did have the whole cinema in stitches.) I mean in the more genderal way that people staggering around in a haze of narcosis can look quite amusing if you're stone-cold sober and no longer inherently impressed by such things.
None of which is to deny that it's still a very sexy and sometimes unsettling film. It's just that, as ever, the closer I get to anything, the harder it gets to take it entirely seriously.
Tell my teenage self that, once I'd relocated to London, I'd attend the cinema with friends for Performance sober and then head straight home, and I'd be unimpreszsed. But I was tired, and so were most of them, and there'll always be another party along soon enough. And it was worth it to catch the first episode of vivisection-com I Am Not An Animal, which is every bit as brilliant as one would expect from a new comedy featuring Steve Coogan and Simon Pegg. Even if they are voicing animals who have been given human intellect and then reared exclusively on lifestyle magazines. It's a satire on the vacuity of contemporary culture, sure, and my tolerance for those isn't that high, but it succeeds through its absurdity. I'm always complaining about much-loved comedies like The Office which hope to satirise reality simply by replicating it in microscopic detail, because to work for me they need to turn it up to 11. A talking horse assuming that other animals can't talk because "They're working class. People below a certain level of breeding can't talk, only point at one another and fight" works for me.
I was there to see Performance. Last time I saw this was about a decade ago, on a sofa in Derby, when I was still somewhere within view of innocence, and it all seemed dreadfully exotic. This time around the comedy was more apparent. I don't just mean the line, to Mick Jagger as
None of which is to deny that it's still a very sexy and sometimes unsettling film. It's just that, as ever, the closer I get to anything, the harder it gets to take it entirely seriously.
Tell my teenage self that, once I'd relocated to London, I'd attend the cinema with friends for Performance sober and then head straight home, and I'd be unimpreszsed. But I was tired, and so were most of them, and there'll always be another party along soon enough. And it was worth it to catch the first episode of vivisection-com I Am Not An Animal, which is every bit as brilliant as one would expect from a new comedy featuring Steve Coogan and Simon Pegg. Even if they are voicing animals who have been given human intellect and then reared exclusively on lifestyle magazines. It's a satire on the vacuity of contemporary culture, sure, and my tolerance for those isn't that high, but it succeeds through its absurdity. I'm always complaining about much-loved comedies like The Office which hope to satirise reality simply by replicating it in microscopic detail, because to work for me they need to turn it up to 11. A talking horse assuming that other animals can't talk because "They're working class. People below a certain level of breeding can't talk, only point at one another and fight" works for me.
