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I have been awake for ten hours.
Dec. 15th, 2010 02:06 pmDoesn't the weekend seem a long time ago now? Even more so for the approximately 50% of people I know who were in chalets, falling in love with Frightened Rabbit, I suppose. But London had its share of inadvisable festive drinking too. Red absinth was a bad idea. I've also finally been to the new pub at the end of the road, the Stapleton. Which is a lot less depressing than it was in its previous incarnation as the Larrick, but then you could still say that if they'd replaced the Larrick with a concentration camp where the furnaces were soundtracked by Avril Lavigne. The Stapleton, on the other hand, is Actually Rather Nice, strangely cosy for such a large space, helped by the most enormous Christmas tree I've seen indoors in ages.
Otherwise: viewing! I have another DVD rental trial thanks to Aug, and while I'm startled at some of the films that aren't available (I'm not talking obscurities either, but stuff starring Liz Taylor, or Orson Welles, or directed by Cronenberg) they did start well by sending me Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Which I want to say is a great film, but that would in some ways be untrue. It has a particularly annoying use of that crappy fake night-time effect you see in old colour movies, where they film through sunglasses and hope you won't notice the shadows. And the entire supporting cast is rubbish. But that sort of works, because be they wise antiquarian, or land speed record holder, or great bullfighter, none of them is anything in the face of myth. And Ava Gardner, as Pandora, and James Mason, as the Dutchman van der Zee, have all the grandeur of myths. As they dance around each other in the dream-like, vaguely Felliniesque port of Esperanza (no, the names aren't subtle) they are simply mesmerising, and everything around them partakes of that and becomes so too. Meaning that a film about the cursed immortal van der Zee's quest to escape this world has a camera that's utterly in love with it. Flawed, but well worth seeing.
I've been meaning to watch lesbian cult classic The Killing of Sister George for about a decade, and it was worth the wait. They don't make battleaxes like Beryl Reid anymore.
While I no longer hate Colin Baker Doctor Who like I used to, I still can't deny that most of his TV stories were rubbish. Vengeance on Varos is an exception. Mostly. Shown in 1985, it's a prescient vision of a society sedated by watching people tormented on TV (Jason Connery is a bit wooden in the victim's role, though still considerably more lifelike than Gillian McKeith) while rations are cut. The rulers are powerless figureheads, while unaccountable corporations grow fat through the insistence that there's no other way, and if their demands aren't met they'll simply leave. Admittedly, some of the enactment of this theme involves the old Who standby of wandering around corridors, narrowly avoiding a series of baffling and inconsistent traps, but the sentiment and vision are there, and so is most of the script. Excellent work from Martin Jarvis as the poor bloody Governor, too. He almost makes one feel sympathy for modern politicians. Almost.
Otherwise: viewing! I have another DVD rental trial thanks to Aug, and while I'm startled at some of the films that aren't available (I'm not talking obscurities either, but stuff starring Liz Taylor, or Orson Welles, or directed by Cronenberg) they did start well by sending me Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Which I want to say is a great film, but that would in some ways be untrue. It has a particularly annoying use of that crappy fake night-time effect you see in old colour movies, where they film through sunglasses and hope you won't notice the shadows. And the entire supporting cast is rubbish. But that sort of works, because be they wise antiquarian, or land speed record holder, or great bullfighter, none of them is anything in the face of myth. And Ava Gardner, as Pandora, and James Mason, as the Dutchman van der Zee, have all the grandeur of myths. As they dance around each other in the dream-like, vaguely Felliniesque port of Esperanza (no, the names aren't subtle) they are simply mesmerising, and everything around them partakes of that and becomes so too. Meaning that a film about the cursed immortal van der Zee's quest to escape this world has a camera that's utterly in love with it. Flawed, but well worth seeing.
I've been meaning to watch lesbian cult classic The Killing of Sister George for about a decade, and it was worth the wait. They don't make battleaxes like Beryl Reid anymore.
While I no longer hate Colin Baker Doctor Who like I used to, I still can't deny that most of his TV stories were rubbish. Vengeance on Varos is an exception. Mostly. Shown in 1985, it's a prescient vision of a society sedated by watching people tormented on TV (Jason Connery is a bit wooden in the victim's role, though still considerably more lifelike than Gillian McKeith) while rations are cut. The rulers are powerless figureheads, while unaccountable corporations grow fat through the insistence that there's no other way, and if their demands aren't met they'll simply leave. Admittedly, some of the enactment of this theme involves the old Who standby of wandering around corridors, narrowly avoiding a series of baffling and inconsistent traps, but the sentiment and vision are there, and so is most of the script. Excellent work from Martin Jarvis as the poor bloody Governor, too. He almost makes one feel sympathy for modern politicians. Almost.
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