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
29 August 2004 The Island Woodgreen Showcase
Much better than I thought it would be. A slower beginning telling the story, the characters not knowing a. what they are or b. where they are. A lottery which when they win sends them to The Island. They all want to go.
The character played by Ian McGregor has more inquisition than they are supposed to develop and he keeps trying to find stuff out, experience something else. Eventually having an awakening. He and Scarlet escape because they realise they are about to have their organs harvested. Then it becomes a hunt.
Slick. Not original. Not giving us a new sci-fi view bent but I actually quite enjoyed it anyway.
So we rolled up and decided we'd take pot luck and see whatever happened to be starting when we arrived. That happened to be Unleased. I hadn't remembered that I'd seen a trailer for it until the movie started.
Ultra violent, starring people who are hateful with no redeeming features. I thought we were in London until it became apparent that we were in Glasgow. Bob Hoskins is a despicable person who keeps a chinese man as a dog, trained in martial arts (some kind of kick boxing) who 'gets people' whenever his collar is taken off. Eventually he escapes and is returned to regular human existence.
Lots of ugh moments with heads hitting concrete and fast action punching.
Philip French hated it! Its not a good film, and its totally gratuitous, but I watched it anyway.
Goldfrapp - Bails saw them at the V festival, said they were amazing. Love the albums and the Guardian says, "more compelling live than on record". 6 october in London.
Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec - "they shared a fascination wtih sexuality, the city and the nocturnal half-worlds of prostitutes and entertainers" - just makes you wanna see it (I'll listen to the Tiger Lillies and Tom Waits on the way through).
Xenakis: Architect in Sound - don't know much about it but the idea of sound filling a space like a building or sound building itself around you (as the title sparks my mind) is compelling, so might be worth investigating.
Rachel Whiteread - my one time lifedrawing tutor (at Middlesex Poly when doing art foundation) so I've always followed her work out of interest. Loved House in Bow, Ghost and also the work that was displayed when she won the Turner Prize. So she gets to do something as part of the Unilever series at the TateModern. Really looking forward to what she comes up with.
Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch - love his work, yes it sometimes is better than others but several of my favourite films are made by him - Dead Man for instance which I absolutely love, and Night on Earth (the only Winona Ryder film I like). And it has Bill Murray, who I like better and better.
The Beat My Heart Skipped directed by Jacques Audiard - Guardian says "lovers of stylish cinema should make a date for Jacques Audiard's super-cool French thriller." Thats enough for me - love french films, for some reason they are often different, non-commerical and beautiful.
Suprisingly good actors were in this - many favs from TV dramas. Started off well, but as is common with these action/comic things it got a little tiresome at the end, and part way through the middle, actually. And soppy. I didn't read the comics as a kid but they can't have had soppy marriages between superheros in it, surely not. But no! Its true as it says in the synopsis here.
16 August 2005 Dreamspace by Maurice Agis Potter's Field, Southbank
A little notice popped up on our intranet at work. I remember way back (I was thinking the 70s) going to visit this amazing tunnel of coloured light on the Southbank. Wearing a coloured cape, wondering around finding people lolling around on the floor, watching the colour of the walls affect the colour of the cape.
Toady at 7.00pm Dreamspace was very empty, its much larger than I remember - more like large cavern than interlocking bubbles. And Maurice Agis, the artist, was there with his family perhaps. Space, colour and light filled with the sounds of Stephen Montague.
Perhaps its because my memories of it are good but it isn't as awesome as it was back then - I want a little more. It reminds me of Anish Kapoor's huge Marsyas (in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern) and I want something as awesome as that. Its just that I notice the tiny tears in the fabric, and the footprints all over the surface in places like someone has run up the columns (although its probably the installers), and I'm acutely aware of the surface of the ground under the sculpture. But it is intriguing all the same, and if you haven't been before its worth a visit.
Now I'm a big fan of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (don't let the boyfiend hear us talking about this - get in tonnes of trouble for liking the gothic one - his words) and as a kid I loved Roald Dahl's book and the earlier film (Willy Wonka and theChocolate Factory). Despite the fact that it was a children's film we thought that Tim the Master would make it detailed enough for us as adults to enjoy. We were sorely disappointed.
It had typical Burtonesque traits - the music, the snowy urban landscape, halloween, darkness but lacked the excitement and joy of the earlier film, and didn't really capture the feel of the book for me. I didn't think of Willy Wonka as a troubled man, more eccentric and child loving. Johnny Depp had some weird thing going on with his mouth - the teeth were too straight or his mouth smiled strangely over them or something (reminded me of Cher's mouth - too much plastic surgery) and it made his seem rather creepy. Loved Charlie and his grandad though.
Guardian Reviews - I'm inclined to agree with one of the reader's review: gorgeous and dull.
Went to see this without knowing what it was about at all. Missed the build up to it completely. Thought it was going to be about a couple in an accident and what happened.
It was actually about relationships between quite a lot of different people. Linked to a car accident. People involved in different ways. Then the film flashes back to the build up to the accident. Race and stereotypes, and how individual characters learn about themselves following this crash. Powerful and sad. Playing on the fact that things are seldom black and white - there is good and bad, moral and amoral in all of us - a character does something or says something good or insightful and then afterwards is the opposite and vice versa.
Having waited with anticipation, watching the weird adverts and hoping it lived up to the hype, I found that actually it was exciting, and it slightly scared me in the way it was supposed to. I liked it so far. I wished I had E4 so could get an extra episode right after.
Its not weird like Twin Peaks was, but that would be hard to live up to. But I liked the way we twisted around the characters.
