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Archive Category: Film
Pretty Good, Actually
Tuesday, 6 January 2004
Just saw Love Actually.
See it. It’s very excellent. I liked it a great deal.
Colin Firth gets wet again.
I Was Here First
Friday, 9 July 2004
I was planning to moan on about the horrors of sanding and scraping window frames. I was planning on a long descriptive piece about M making us a cooked lunch of pasta with a glass or two of red. However I will abandon these pursuits in the face of necessity. I liked Clive Owen first. Before anyone else. When he played the copper who was losing his sight through a rare eye disease in Second Sight, when he was the suave bloke in Croupier, the singlet-clad lust-bucket in Gosford Park - I have several friends who can prove my longterm lust for Mr Owen, and I am sure they will step forward if requested. If you ask M which film star he is most like he will parrot on command “I am like Clive Owen, I am like Clive Owen.” There. That proves it. Soon I’ll be saying airily, “Oh, Clive? Clive Owen? Oh yes…King Arthur and all that. I like his old stuff…. better than his new stuff.” ;o)
You Bounder
Monday, 16 August 2004
Until last night I’d missed the series of Pride & Prejudice. However, last night I made up for my lack of Darcy-watching. I prepared beforehand by cooking dinner for M and myself, and bringing out, with many a flourish, a bottle of white that I’d managed to successfully hide from him for THREE DAYS. Once I had him thus cornered I was then able to extract a promise that he would not speak during the next hour, and if he did speak, he was not to mock, groan or eyeroll in any way. (This is all related to the Points System, which was explained here.)
This allowed me to concentrate fully on Pride & Prejudice, and I was astonished to realise that since I had last seen it, I had completely forgotten what a cad Mr Darcy really was, particularly at the time of his first (and most thoughtlessly worded) proposal of marriage to Miss Elizabeth Bennet. He was a true and utter bastard! No wonder he had to do a lake scene - it was probably just to get all the female viewers back on side! I mean, he can smoulder and brood with the best of them, but when it comes to proposing to someone by explaining that he is sick of feeling discomfited by being violently in love with them, can’t he just have her permission to get into her pants, and, oh, by the way, he’s not at all sorry about ruining her favourite sister’s only chance at true love - and don’t even attempt to discuss Mr Wickham - it’s a bit much. Now I have to wait A Whole Week for the next episode - torment.
Culture? Culture?
Saturday, 4 September 2004
Holy crap - Hervey Bay gets some cinema from outside the mainstream. Let me pick my jaw up off the floor and run towards the light. Run towards the light!
Thai a yellow ribbon…
Wednesday, 9 February 2005
I have, for the most part, disengaged from the clutch of Blackie. Last night, I took M on a Date. The Date that I tried to take him on this time last week, but he was too ill. These are the things we can do now that we have reconsolidated. So I drove us to the restaurant.
“Oh,” squeaked M, “This Thai restaurant. I thought we were going to the other one.”
“No,” I said, grabbing him as his pace slowed, “we’ve never been here and your mother said it was supposed to be good.”
Both of us, in unsion, stopped walking. I had just said that like it was a good thing. We looked at each other. My look said ‘Don’t even start to wreck my Date plans’ and his look said ‘At times I can be wise, and I will do nothing but give a minimalist shake of my head’.
And we continued on.
Holy crap. It was horrifying. The ceiling was yellow, there was a blue wall, a pink wall, and an aquamarine wall. There were old-time op-shop hits on the stereo. The place was full and there was one waitress. We stayed there for a full hour, in which we got our entrees - a tiny bowl of tom yum soup, and several suspect vegetarian spring rolls. We had drunk two beers apiece and our mains hadn’t arrived. So we left. They didn’t make us pay, either.
I drove us, trying to ignore the cruel destruction of my Date plans, to the proper Thai restaurant, where we ordered our mains and got them within about ten minutes. Naturally, in keeping with sods law, M got something divine and I tried to live vicariously through his choice by spooning his sauce on to my rice. By the time we were full and round there was still time to get to Date Part B. The movies! Oh. My. God. I hadn’t been to the cinema up here for one year and five weeks. It still smelt like dampy mustiness. We waited for 15 minutes in the cinema for our movie to start, and then, in my guise of Date-Fixer, I went and asked the useless people that work there whether they would consider showing the movie that everybody was waiting to see. Then we saw Ocean’s 12 and drove home. Completely knackered.
Pedal to the Metal
Sunday, 5 June 2005
Last night I attended a GNI (Girls Night In). We ate disgusting amounts of pizza and watched Bride and Predjudice, while trying to figure out who was Lizzie, who was Jane, whether they had killed off that sister who is Lydia’s sidekick who never gets to do much, or had just judged the character as so boring that they edited her out of the script. None of us could remember the name of the hideous obsequious cousin who proposes to Lizzie, and when rejected, gets off with her best friend - if I was on a faster computer, I’d google for the answer, but as it is, if this computer was an animal, it would be a snail.
At about twenty to midnight I began to get the feeling that I should leave, or I was going to miss the last train back to Collingwood. I had ridden to West Preston from Thornbury station, so I took my leave and pedalled back, fast. But not fast enough. I had missed the last train by ten minutes, and had to ride my bike back to Collingwood - so if you were driving down High Street just after midnight, you might have seen me labouring along…
Look Both Ways William McInnes
Tuesday, 13 September 2005
I feel somewhat inundated by the persona of William McInnes. I went from resenting him utterly a few years back for taking over the untakeable role of Diver Dan on Seachange, to realising, belatedly, that he actually did quite a good job of it. Then I saw him plugging his book, A Man’s Got to Have a Hobby, at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. He made me cry laughing, multiple times - I bought his book on the basis of his reading of the section about Golan, the aggressive Christmas tree. He signed it for me, and asked whether I’d had an advent calendar when I was little. I had, I told him. Well, he said, if you liked Golan, you’ll proably like the bit about the advent calendar too. I was tempted to tell him that I lived around the corner from him for five years, but restrained myself and swooned away down the stairs.
I whizzed home in the Humber on an internal pillow of giggles, ignored an morose M, and sat on the bed for the next two hours, cackling my way through the book. I have no idea why I found it so funny (sorry William McInnes). The last time I laughed so much was at Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. M finally growled at me, as I dried my eyes for the fifth time, “B, you’re getting a bit tedious.” I didn’t care. Much.
Last night we hit the Nova and saw Look Both Ways; the film written and directed by Sarah Watt (his wife) and starring him, naturally. It was fantastic. The animation worked beautifully, and reminded me of the workings of my own mind. The characters were all loosely connected in a web that pulled tighter as the movie progressed. I wish very much that I had seen the episode of Australian Story that focussed on him and his wife.
I highly recommend Look Both Ways, and I intend to see it again. Don’t wait for the DVD - it’s definitely a bigscreen exprerience.
P & P circa 2005
Sunday, 23 October 2005
Robert asked how I liked the latest film version of Pride and Prejudice. And, as I am lately feeling I have either nothing or too much to blog about (and thus blog nothing), I thought I would answer here. I am a big fan of the Ehle/Firth BBC version, but, when I went to the cinema last weekend, I very much wished I could erase it from my mind, because I couldn’t help making comparisons all the way through.
As soon as it had run for ten minutes I began to get anxious about how on earth they were going to fit everything into 90 minutes. It was simple. They didn’t. I think I would have appreciated the latest P&P effort much more if I wasn’t so familiar with the BBC version. All the characters were perfectly cast (although I did prefer Julia Sawalha as Lydia - but then I prefer her over most people). There was a bit more dirt and domesticity, and I liked the Charlotte Lucas character better in this version.
Matthew McFayden was an acceptable Darcy i.e. generally unattractive at the beginning when he’s supposed to be an arrogant pain, and then morphing into a bit of smouldering action as time passes and he cannot resist Elizabeth Bennet. Obviously there was no ‘wet white shirt’ scene and there was a little less chemistry in between the leads - but that might have been down to the time restrictions of cinema (as opposed to the seven part series, or whatever it was, which allowed a lot more time to build the URST).
The story in general didn’t have any gaping holes as far as tying everything together went (although it’s been a long time since I read the book). There were a few too many gratuitous panorama shots - e.g. where she’s standing on a precipice looking gorgeous and windswept while doing nothing in particular - but hey, they had to put some scenery porn in there.
It appeared to rain every day.
I reckon (on the Margaret & David scale) I give it three and a half stars, and I would have given it more, but…well, you know the but.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Go Go!
Sunday, 20 November 2005
Just went and saw this film. Loved it. I think I give it four and a half stars. Anyone who has ever had a thing for noir-ish crime fiction should check it out. It brought Sin City to mind, but only in a similarity of genre. KK,BB is far more funny, with equal parts snappy repartee and black slapstick. Robert Downey Jnr is an excellent narrator and Val Kilmer is a great gay private eye. The guy who wrote and directed also wrote the Lethal Weapon films, but this is far more cool.
Withnail and Me
Thursday, 8 June 2006
Last night we ventured out to ACMI to see Richard E Grant introduce a screening of the original print of Withnail and I. He was hilarious, swore a lot and was happy to answer a few questions here and there - even when one of the questions was ‘can you autograph this for me?’ - he was accommodating - and effusive on the quality of her ‘luggage’.
Although I’ve probably sat in front of the film at least twice, it’s always been late and at a party, so I’d never really got the whole thing in its entirety. The Withnail fans that I was there with (sorry) said that the version we saw last night had extra bits in it that they, in all their hardcore fanishness, had never seen before. Yah!
I now see why my dad used to say that he imagined Christine and I swathed in Deep Heat rub to keep warm in our little house in Geelong West where we would have to trawl the alleys for bits of old furniture to burn and had no phone or television. Ah, the joys of 1991.
loudQUIETloud
Sunday, 6 August 2006
After some serious buggering around and automotive difficulties, M and I finally managed to get ourselves into the big City on Sunday for a jaunt. The day was cold. We scoffed hot chocolate at Max Brenner (I would have infinitely preferred Sugardough, but it was too far away) and bought a few little things at some homewares shop - an oven thermometer, a splatter trapper etc. After early dinner at Ito, with the relationship still intact, I took M to the cinema on Russell Street for his surprise film. There was a line. We joined it.
As we sat in the cinema and it slowly filled up around us, M started observing our fellow filmgoers.
“Most of the guys have shaved heads.”
“There are hardly any blonde girls.”
“Every one is looking kind of funky and wearing black or dark colours.”
“Are we seeing some kind of share house movie? A movie about a punk band?”
I continued to look enigmatic. The film we were seeing was loudQUIETloud - film about The Pixies. It was supremely excellent. The only thing missing was Kim Deal doing Gigantic, which was a bit of a shame, but it was great seeing all the behind the scenes and roadtrippy stuff. Highly recommended!
Six Feet Sleepy
Tuesday, 31 October 2006
Until now we have subscribed to my father’s rule - “Don’t Spend More Than $10 on a DVD“. Thus, our entire DVD collection until now consisted of two DVD’s about bushfires in Australia (free from my work), a Pixies DVD (donated by Honeybones to alleviate Hervey Bay), Dangerous Liasons ($7.99), Reservoir Dogs Special Edition ($9.99)… and I think that’s about it. I have real trouble sitting down to watch a DVD or video and I never watch things twice. However. The tide has turned. During our successful rug shopping mission on Saturday morning, we went into K-Mart. They were having a sale. When I pointed out that there were four seasons of Six Feet Under on sale, I also mentioned that our friend, Mr H, thinks Six Feet Under is the biz. That was enough for M. He went slightly crazy. He bought them ALL!!
We have never even seen Six Feet Under on television, but last night we stayed up (still freaked by daylight savings, which saw us eating dinner around 9pm) and watched the first two episodes. Very cool. And thus we woke up late and I am at work with gritty eyes. But never fear - tonight I return, masquerading as my mother, to HOT YOGA. Yeah, baby! Dig that alternate nostril breathing!
Junebug
Tuesday, 14 November 2006
M and I made it through the first series of Six Feet Under last night. OK, so I was slow to get on to it - but here in Australia, a lot of the better television shows usually get shunted into indescribably stupid timeslots, and as we don’t have a media centre (yet) and are too disorganised to tape stuff, it passed us by. But it’s great to watch without the interuption of advertising. Bliss, in fact. Anyway, neither of us are allowed to watch on our own, we want to stay in sync - so tonight I watched a movie I’ve been meaning to see for ages. Junebug.
I enjoyed it. It’s not the worlds most memorable or astonishing movie. And the ending kind of left things hanging. But on the other hand, it was a little Anne Tyler-ish. I’d go with three and a half stars out of five…
Six Feet Stupido
Wednesday, 6 December 2006
(…actually, it’s more like five foot seven.)
I was speaking quite eloquently to my mother just over a month ago.
“We went out and saw the first four series of Six Feet Under on sale. M had a spasm and bought them on a whim. We just started watching the other night, and now we’re addicted and can’t stop! This hasn’t happened since the Twin Peaks video marathon of 1997. We’ve never owned a series on DVD before. In fact we only own two proper DVDs that aren’t to do with bushfire. We’ve got Dangerous Liasons and Reservoir Dogs. We watch them on my laptop - and did I say we bought Six Feet Under? It’s excellent. We own it you know.”
What my mother heard;
“Something about some kind of DVD sort of thing. I like Six Feet Under. It’s really great.”
In the meantime she went to Vietnam, bought a bucketload of highly suspect latest release movies on DVD and then came to visit on the day the Wiggle was de-skivvied, last week. I began again (so limited are my topics of conversation):
“So we’re now into series three of Six Feet Under and it is SO GOOD. We watch a few episodes each night, and I’ve just realised that there five series, so we’re actually missing the last one and I’ve just been looking at it on Ebay and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,” I said, as my mother looked ever increasingly pained. In the end, after about 45 minutes, she snapped.
“OK! OK!! So I might as well just tell you that we got you the box set. The BOX SET of Six Feet Under. Right? And you’re telling me you’ve already got it. Are you?”
I squeaked. “No - I’m telling you I’ve got all of them but the last series. Which I’m assuming will be in the BOX SET. BOX SET,” I said again, just to say it.
“Well you can stop watching any further episodes as of right now,” she snarled.
I shook my head in mute refusal, Six Feet Under being my current opiate of choice.
“I mean it,” she insisted, “I don’t want either of you watching one more minute. Or your present will be completely ruined. Where are they? I’m going to take them home so and you can have them back after Christmas.”
“I don’t THINK so. Just because your cheap-and-excellent-and-looks-expensive Christmas present is dead in the water. If you’d listened to me in the first place when I kept parroting on about it you would have known. It’s not showing on TV - I obviously had it on DVD. Gah.”
I think she wanted me to believe that the humidity had gotten to her over in Vietnam, and so when she thought of me while standing in the DVD shop, all she saw were my lips saying Six Feet Under, Six Feet Under, with no other associated information. Personally? I think all her brain cells are getting exhausted from too much pilates.
I really have to stop posting about conversations with my mother. I can already feel Small Brother shaking his head over me in London.
