![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
On the verge of making a stand
Club Popular tonight. Have I ever mentioned how a whole evening of Number One hits is like looking into the face of a god and realising you've known him all along/the end of DC One Million before? I believe I might have done. Still.
All urban foxes and Michaelmas daisies these past few days, and drifts of leaves in the cooling sunlight (well, except Tuesday when it was a summer heat again, as I strode around to find various bits and pieces including Turnpike House, only to realise that the 4 goes past it anyway so I'd already seen it plenty of times. Must remember to wander the Barbican at some point too while I'm on my St Etienne rambles. But I also found time to try Settlers of Catan (a beautifully constructed little boardgame which plays a little like a minimalist Civilisation, minus the overt warfare, and which I am possibly biased towards because I won) and Munchkin (a feast of backstabbing hilarity at which, on initial results, I suck).
I'd been meaning to see Breakfast on Pluto for ages, but kept not getting round to it. I didn't know much beyond it having Gavin Friday in and being about a transvestite. Turns out he's not the half of it - you also get Stephen Rea,
Ian Hart, Liam Neeson, all playing roles you'd normally think too small for them to bother with, but then it is a Neil Jordan film and I suppose that counts for something. Also, Bryan Ferry and Brendan Gleeson playing a would-be rapist and a violently alcoholic Womble, respectively. Being Neil Jordan, yes there are IRA elements to the plot but otherwise it's basically a kitchen sink Velvet Goldmine - a confused young man chases a lost vision of glamour. Cilian Murphy is very pretty in the lead, if a little too mumblecore at times - though, for all his eyelashes, I'm not sure he ever quite passes as female to the degree the plot sometimes seems to want.
In The Loop, which I should also have seen long before now, is rather less of a fairytale. The basic Thick of It-goes-to-war set-up is confused slightly by having everyone except Malcolm Tucker and Jamie play similar characters to those they did on TV, but not the same people, and there are one or two missed opportunities. For instance, when Malcolm confronts James Gandolfini as a US general, they get most of the way towards the key point - Malcolm may threaten to kill people as a matter of course, the General literally has - but then don't quite press the point. Still, we do get a wonderful scene where Malcolm realises his place in the scheme of things and is, for a moment, a broken man, which acts almost as a bridge between Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It and his apparently very different government advisor in Torchwood: Children of Earth
These are minor quibbles, but they are the most I can really say about the film, because I believe some of my readers still have workplace filters that don't like swears, and as with The Thick of It the film spin-off is magnificent and hilarious, and as with The Thick of It much of that magnificence and hilarity lies in the wonderfully inventive swearing.
All urban foxes and Michaelmas daisies these past few days, and drifts of leaves in the cooling sunlight (well, except Tuesday when it was a summer heat again, as I strode around to find various bits and pieces including Turnpike House, only to realise that the 4 goes past it anyway so I'd already seen it plenty of times. Must remember to wander the Barbican at some point too while I'm on my St Etienne rambles. But I also found time to try Settlers of Catan (a beautifully constructed little boardgame which plays a little like a minimalist Civilisation, minus the overt warfare, and which I am possibly biased towards because I won) and Munchkin (a feast of backstabbing hilarity at which, on initial results, I suck).
I'd been meaning to see Breakfast on Pluto for ages, but kept not getting round to it. I didn't know much beyond it having Gavin Friday in and being about a transvestite. Turns out he's not the half of it - you also get Stephen Rea,
Ian Hart, Liam Neeson, all playing roles you'd normally think too small for them to bother with, but then it is a Neil Jordan film and I suppose that counts for something. Also, Bryan Ferry and Brendan Gleeson playing a would-be rapist and a violently alcoholic Womble, respectively. Being Neil Jordan, yes there are IRA elements to the plot but otherwise it's basically a kitchen sink Velvet Goldmine - a confused young man chases a lost vision of glamour. Cilian Murphy is very pretty in the lead, if a little too mumblecore at times - though, for all his eyelashes, I'm not sure he ever quite passes as female to the degree the plot sometimes seems to want.
In The Loop, which I should also have seen long before now, is rather less of a fairytale. The basic Thick of It-goes-to-war set-up is confused slightly by having everyone except Malcolm Tucker and Jamie play similar characters to those they did on TV, but not the same people, and there are one or two missed opportunities. For instance, when Malcolm confronts James Gandolfini as a US general, they get most of the way towards the key point - Malcolm may threaten to kill people as a matter of course, the General literally has - but then don't quite press the point. Still, we do get a wonderful scene where Malcolm realises his place in the scheme of things and is, for a moment, a broken man, which acts almost as a bridge between Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It and his apparently very different government advisor in Torchwood: Children of Earth
These are minor quibbles, but they are the most I can really say about the film, because I believe some of my readers still have workplace filters that don't like swears, and as with The Thick of It the film spin-off is magnificent and hilarious, and as with The Thick of It much of that magnificence and hilarity lies in the wonderfully inventive swearing.