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
21 May 2004 Brancusi The Essence of Things Tate Modern
Room 2. A room full of heads. Beautiful, subtle, tactile sculptures. Some more reaslitic than others with indication of hair, ears, eyes and nose, gradually they became more stylized and paired down until they were egg-like with groves and planes where features would be.
Choice of materials was integral to the work. White stone often, ideas worked out in plaster. Stones like marble, smoothed to the point of lustre perfection. You can feel the cold exuding off them. Limestone, texture with sparkle inside, like frost on cold day.
Sort of crushingly beautiful in their elegance and yet deeply touching. Made me feed sorrow at being so far away from my sister and niece.
Room 3. In the beginning of the world was an egg. Potent imagery of creation, birth, nurture.
Further Rooms. The plinths were often sculptural themselves, top heavy, roughly hewn in wood. Squared off blocks supporting sculptures of beautiful stones, delicately carved (how can you possibly delicately carve a hard stone - the end result belies the process of its making). Some of the wooden works had integrated plinths - all carved from one piece of wood. Other works had plinths of several pieces with the curved stone sculpture balanced on them.
The work reminded me of one of my favourite contemporary artists, Alison Wilding, who once wrote in her book that her work was about the relationships of objects to each other - on-top-ness, standing-up-ness, besideness, next-to-ness etc. This is exactly what this work felt like (seems to me he must have been a large influence on her). How does one piece sit on this small stone plinth that is resting on this larger wooden plinth? Wood supports stone. Weight of the stone bares down on the wood making it stable. Contrast of materials - texture, temperature, colour.
Finally bird in space. Aerodynamic, more like a movement than a representation, shiny brass tall thin curve, a sharp edge occurs at a change in plane. Beautiful.
9 May 2004 Kill Bill Volume 2 Empire Leicester Square Homage to Film Noir, Westerns, comic books, kung fu movies. The gritty black and white quality of film noir, blond women, driving in open topped cars, we focus on them driving as the scenery passes them by at an alarming rate. The bleached out dusty scenery of westerns, one horse towns, in the middle of the desert, far in the distance hills. Zombie flicks - the walking dead (one scene). Much Kung-fu. The Oscar for Best Eyebrows in Film goes to: Gordon Lui for his role Pai Mei.
Its a mesh - thats what makes Tarantino movies what they are, masses of ideas, woven together to form a story. Theres the flashbacks, the road movies and the fighting. There are also favoured actors doing their thing (Michael Madsen for instance). There's a classic theory which will likely enter classic monologue moments (remember Royal with Cheese?, or the Like a Virgin monologue) about how superman differs from other comic book heros because he is superman by birth and dresses up as Clark Kent to blend in while other superheros are humans who dress up in superhero costumes to be super.
Its uncomfortable, explanatory and somehow gruesome but ok. Partially because a lot of the bloody moments are in black and white I think.
I found it difficult to get into. Partly because it was terribly confusing at first - I didn't know why this seemingly odd but ordinary man would fall for this in-your-face blue haired girl on the train. I didn't warm to any of the characters. I don't like Jim Carey (I find it hard to see through him himself - his rubbery face, cartoon-character-ishness). Story was interesting. The set was very grey, grubby green. It sort of dragged its feet along.
However the story was interesting, full of twists that eventually started to make sense. Quirky. The idea that painful memories could be isolated and erased is interesting and yes you could see how someone deep in the moment of relationship-shit-grief could rush in for it as a treatment for the depression of post-breakup misery. And that the Jim Carey character half way through the procedure could see that actually those memories are precious after all (becuase they include happy as well as bad memories). Cut to hiding in the mind with the dwindling memories. I started feeling like he didn't have enough counselling before being sent forward for the procedure and mistrusting the quack doctor who used a computer as his only tool. Gradually as the film went on I liked it better. But it was uncomfortable, had moments of pure charicature and I couldn't get away from the fact that Jim Carey looked alot like Nate from Six Feet Under and the part would have been a lot better if it had been played by Peter Krause (less rubber facing, less Jim Carey, less cartoon).
Great shared concept: "the dining dead" - those bored couples you see in restaurants who have grown tired of each other and have nothing to say to one another but persist in being together. Who hasn't sat with their great newish partner in a restuarant and hoped either secretly or out loud that you will never turn into them?
Oh I don't know I think I have been seeing too many films that are bad. I don't seem to have a good thing to say about anything at the moment and I don't know how to talk about this film without spoiling it if you haven't seen it.
I like Johnny Depp. I like his quirky looks and dark eyes. He can be just so sexy at times. But here he isn't. He does a sort of talking to himself thing which I don't know whether its supposed to be cute, or funny, because this isn't a funny film. I didn't laugh but I don't think you are supposed to. Its just I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel about it.
For the longest time it sort of runs along. It concentrates on the details. Its very slow. Johnny Depp does a lot of napping. There are some flashbacks for added information. Its set in those American forests where houses are by lakes in the middle of nowhere (like The Others). Those forests are terrifying without making weird people live out in them.
So you know where you're at, what seems to be happening in the film and then BAM! It turns out to be something else. There's no way to explain it, it doesn't make any sense and it sort of negates the entire beginning of the movie. As an audience it seemed hard work to get to know the character. There were no particularly likeable characters apart from perhaps the needle-pointing sheriff (desperate attempt to make him quirky like Fargo?).
When it got to the end it was dissatisfying, I felt cheated.
30 April 2004 Invisible at The Night Gallery Corsica Arts Club, Corsica Studios, Elephant and Castle
Corsica Arts runs a training programme in Events Management for young people. This exhibition was the end result of a week long intensive course where the students had been either studying stage management, performance, filming or front of house. They had transformed the three rooms under the arches into distinctly different spaces with specific purposes: a gallery (traditional whitewashed walls and good lighting), a performance stage with bands, spoken word and DJs, and a projection room showing a loop of artists films (animation, video and film).
My favourite films included:
Mumble by Kerry Baldry - short, the same mouth all over the screen, saying something inaudible all at the same time.
A film (can't remember title) by Anne Pigalle - video, tale of a rise to fame and the dullness of life after fame, infamy, Parisian, seedy. Contrasting imagery. I wandered the streets "collecting rumours and faces"..
Tales of Bighead by Amanda Moss - fairytale of a womanbird who can bestow everlasting life on someone by putting her birdwing arm around them. Therefore a much sought after possession. An evil pirate travels the earth trying to capture her. Animation. Reminiscent of a Japanese TV series like Monkey.
Tales of Bighead was followed by another film that looked like the dying bird woman - a dancer wearing a costume full of feathers did a dance like a dying bird, feathers escaping from her costume all the while.
The North Sea Circle by Richard Coldman/Alexander Gorlizki - the stories of a group of friends, each and everyone weird and wonderful in some way - the woman structural engineer with beautiful coats, the eye doctor , the photographer who loved to travel and faked discovered buildings in far off lands photos, the plumbing- lover and the man who's midas touch turned everything into wool. Quirky and funny if a little slow.
Instant Pussy by Arthur Larger - rude short and hysterically funny as well as kind of disgusting at the same time.
And then we listened to a live set of Anne Pigalle's poetry and songs, followed by some crashing guitars and drum music, watched light shows swirl around the room and then decided we should head home.
