A Grand Quiet

Funny how a one week break turns into two when you have near zero discipline and self control. It’s good to be back, turns out the one thing that makes me more frustrated than writing is not writing. Here’s the last week’s lot.

I’ve been telling a lot of people to watch Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, I managed to catch it at a film festival a good few months ago and have been sitting on my excitement since.

It’s like every frame is draped with so much perfection that it becomes impossible to glimpse the working parts underneath. It’s so striking, so mercurial that you really can’t deny the power of the thing. >>more>>

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman has been responsible for the past few weeks’ best inspiring tweets. I’m so glad the film itself is as perfect as it needs to be.

Wonder Woman is dope. And sure it’s a little unconvincing at times, and the villain’s a bit shit (as usual), and there’s this pointless framing narrative that only exists to remind you that the Justice League exists; but now there’s a movie that decides it has the time to make Wonder Woman herself an actual character, Diana proves herself to be like the best person. >>more>>

Seth Gordon’s Baywatch is a misogynist mess. Probably didn’t mean to be but it all comes out in the wash don’t it?

There’s a scene here where Alexandra Daddario’s Summer criticises Zac Efron’s Brody for staring at her tits in the swimsuit she’s wearing. It’d be a nice moment if the film were in any way aware of the rampant male gaze of the camera. >>more>>

Because I’m obviously a consumerist fool I actually enjoyed Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge. Minus a star for that real world Johnny Depp stuff tho.

Sure, Dead Man’s Chest is a incoherently structured trashpile and At World’s End is an overlong, overstuffed mess and with On Stranger Tides they realised far too late that Depp’s Jack Sparrow can’t carry a film on his own. But despite all that, despite all the self-indulgence and self-importance threatening to overwhelm it, there’s a core to these films which I can’t escape. >>more>>

Hirokazu Koreeda’s After the Storm has Kirin Kiki giving one of the year’s best performances so far. Dope shit.

It’s a bad dad tale. I guess the real tragedy is that he’s not even close to being the worst dad we’ve seen on the screen and even then he don’t get off too easy. At the same time, speaking as someone with they own daddy issues, he gets more than he deserves. >>more>>

Over here in the UK our election is over. I’ll admit it’s been interesting to see Corbyn actually get good at playing the populist game over the past few weeks. Like it was when Grime4Corbyn started and he realised he had to centre his image while decentreing his authorial voice over the campaign that he started to take off. He was allowed to stop being himself and start being whatever people wanted him to be.

We’ll see if he’ll be able to carry this into being an effective leader of the opposition. (Though I’m writing this on Sunday and it seems the Tory DUP coalition ain’t a done deal yet as they don’t answer their email on God’s day.) I doubt it, maybe stronger party backing is all he needs, and at least the apologists don’t get to trot out that defence no more. He gotta prove he’s getting better at teamwork fast because he still ain’t a convincing orator or debater.

Get better at messaging too,  when you’re in the house being a friendly ghost can’t be enough. We’ll see by next week, in the meantime this election has proved nothing more than to be an interesting diversion on our trip down into hell.

I keep listening to this one episode of Reply All, or well, the Yes Yes No segment they do at the beginning. I’m usually pretty silently smug about knowing the right answers when I do, but for some reason the compounding goofy escalation of this one keeps me coming back. Normally the answers they come to are interesting, if a little pedestrian, usually it something about the news. The tale of this decade old meme which is still going around and which I remember the start of just delights me so so much.

I also worked the lighting for some friends’ play earlier this week, Monday and Tuesday, Films About Ghosts. The performances were a great success and got some great reviews, I really couldn’t be prouder and happier for the folks. We’re performing our other play Howl later this month, I’m looking forward to it, ain’t been on the stage in too long.

I try not to read my posting schedule as a graphic chart of my health and mood but it really is inescapable sometimes. I’ve drunk three cups of coffee this morning.

Love y’all.

E

For music listen to Alt J’s RELAXER and laugh. Wow, how the mighty have fallen.