![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeFilm Festival
I saw Stone of Destiny, which is about people taking the stone of scone back from Westminster Abbey in the 1950s. They said at the start that they weren't going to have a Q&A, but instead they brought the director and four main actors up to the front just for us to look at, which was quite odd. I mean, we were just about to see a whole film with them in quite a bit. One of them said "remember, top right hand corner" and the audience laughed, but top right hand isn't the bit of the card you tear off if you want to say it's unmissable, and I don't know whether he didn't know or was telling us that it wasn't all that good. It was quite good, actually. It was a bit worthy, but possibly not if you're actually Scottish and not merely an English upstart sitting in a sea of clapping people at the end of a film about Scottish nationalism. Billy Boyd was in it, and Robert Carlyle, though they weren't among the people we got to look at at the start. It was very verdant, and apparently filmed in Vancouver. Bits of it, anyway. Probably not the Westminster Abbey exteriors, unless I'm making undue assumptions about Canadian architecture.
After a day's break I returned to see Dummy, which is about two boys whose mum dies, and the older one has to look after the younger, who is taking it rather well apart from dressing up a dummy in his mother's close and wig and making it tea. The two boys were very good indeed, and one of them is in Angus Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, which I am very much looking forward to seeing. It was very sad, but not wallowing in it, trying to show how grief was there all the time. There was a Q&A with the director and the two boys, which I can't remember anything about, other than that the woman leading it annoyed me by saying that the elder boy would have girls screaming at him in the streets soon, which I think is all-round offensive, so well done her. Oh, and when the director introduced it he said that he'd never had anyone pay to see a film of his before. Then I saw Love and Other Crimes, which is a Serbian film about the last day of a woman who is planning to steal money from her criminal boyfriend and leave her whole life behind forever. The director was there, and introduced it by saying that he didn't know what to tell us, except that it was one hundred minutes long, and he hoped we enjoyed it. Afterwards he was very animated, and when someone asked a good question, pointed at her and said delightedly "I like how you think!". He was very lovely indeed, and when someone asked about the possibility of a Serbian film without violence and sadness he promised that his next film would be a comedy, and pointed out that he had made a short film, which was about war, but no-one died, and it had a cow. I am not a little in love with him.
On Thursday I met up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
debodacious and equally charming daughter, and we went to see A Film With Me In It, which actually has Dylan Moran in it, and not me. It was ace. At first I wasn't at all sure about it, but it was very funny and fairly ingenious. There is a man who has three accidental deaths (and a dog) in his flat, and is concerned that no-one will believe him, so enlists his friend to help him sort it out. The Q&A had the director and three actors (including Dylan Moran), one of whom wrote the film.
Friday was Transsiberian, which starred Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson, and also featured Ben Kingsley and Kate Mara. The slight downside of not really remembering synopses is that you can get a nasty surprise in the form of torture scenes. It was very good indeed, though I had to keep my eyes closed for a little bit. They're an American couple on the transsiberian express who meet up with a young couple, and then Emily Mortimer kills him after he seems to be about to rape her, then it turns out that they were drug runners and she's stuck with the heroin, then she confesses all to the police guy who is now sharing their cabin only it turns out that he's actually a rather awful criminal and they have to try and escape from a bunker in the snow with no shoes and then there's a train crash but then the army rescue them. This mostly happens all at once at the end, it seemed quite slow to start with. Emily Mortimer was there to introduce the film, and then a Q&A afterwards, but I was tired and a bit argh at the blood still, so I didn't stay for it.
On Saturday I saw Princess of Nebraska, a film about a Chinese girl studying in America who goes to San Francisco to have an abortion. She spends the night before her appointment at a party where the non-Chinese guests talk about what is wrong with China over her head, in a bar where she is temporarily a hostess entertaining businessmen with karaoke, in a hotel room with one of the hostesses, a beautiful woman who looks like the father of her baby but is unsurprisingly not keen on pretending to be, meeting a man to try and sell her baby for a high price, and then eventually at the appointment, where the worker talks to her about whether she has any way to keep the baby. I liked it - the girl wasn't all on top of everything and smart and knew what she wanted, she was young and a bit scared and in a country that was still very strange to her and far away from her family.
Finally, I saw Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, as part of the best of the fest thing on Sunday. I was not impressed. I don't know .how good the film is for people who haven't read the book, but it left me very cold, and was easily the worst thing I saw at the festival. Amy Adams was rather lovely as Miss LaForge, but while the bulk of the story was the same, they'd twisted things round that really spoilt it for me. Miss Pettigrew doesn't get sent somewhere by accident, she deliberately takes the card when the owner of the employment agency isn't looking, and misrepresents herself. Miss Pettigrew would never have done that. Also, when she is leaving her last post, she runs into a man (who later turns out to be Michael) and drops her suitcase and then runs away leaving it. She could never have brought herself to be so wasteful as to abandon her worldly possessions - then they have her eating at a soup kitchen place, which isn't the point at all, and I don't think it works. They also made Edith, who is kind if brusque and helps Miss Pettigrew to look nice, an evil woman who is Joe's fiancee through false pretences and snubs her. All the women were changed so that rather than being supportive when their own needs allow, and understanding of the things people need to do to survive, they're all cheating, callous, back-stabbing women...except of course Miss Pettigrew, who doesn't come across as quietly capable and morally centred, but rather stupid. So that was rather a disappointing way to end the film festival for me.
As of this week I will be back to making as much use of my Unlimited card as possible, as there are several films that came out while I was otherwise engaged that I'm looking forward to, like Secret Agents and The Edge of Love. I also want to see Teeth, although I think I was misinformed or just overly hopeful, as I thought that a horror about vagina dentata might be quite a feminist thing, but the trailer I last saw suggests otherwise. Still, it'll be something to do, since the television continues appalling.
And now there is but a month to wait until the Fringe and the Book festivals start, and I will have to spend it trying very hard not to buy tickets for everything I want, but to wait and see. I have tickets for my main desires - Debo, Posy Simmonds, Kristin Hersh and The Globe's Romeo and Juliet in the Botanic Gardens, and for the Fringe previews.
Shakespeare
I read The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels as a nice break, and then I decided to read the Bill Bryson book on Shakespeare (thanks, Lizzie!) to see where Antonia Forest might have got her source material from. And Ned's dead. I didn't know, and it quite upset me. He died at 27, which is probably not much past the end of the books. I hope he was still there when Nick came back from his voyage. Apparently he's buried in Southwark Cathedral, so I might try and see it next time I'm there.
I thought about Nick quite a lot when I was watching the histories last month, as we started with Richard II and he had to decide whether to inform, and then later with his Feeble not surprising anyone that he was willing to go to war (Feeble here was played by a woman), and having to deliver the lines even after having heard Anthony Merrick say it as his neck speech. I didn't know the histories (or indeed the history) very well, so I didn't follow all of it, exactly. But it was quite great. I remember there was a bit where lords slapped each other with gloves, and quite a lot of French nobles hanging around on ropes, and Katherine wasn't as awful as she mistly is, and the funny bits were funny, which is quite an achievement , considering. I was sitting next to some people who were also there for the entire series, and we started off saying "thank you" for letting each other past, and built up to friendly hellos each day and then I had quite a nice conversation between parts of Henry VIth with the man next to me about the interrelation between history and current politics, and the iniquities of university funding cuts, and whether or not disciplines truly had integrity that might be lost in interdisciplinary undergraduate work.
Art
The first weekend I was here I took myself off to the Museum of Modern Art and the Dean Gallery. They're right next to each other, and I can't remember what I saw in which, as they've merged somewhat in my head. There was an exhibit on maternity, and I liked some of the pieces (like the replica birthing doll), but the signs were very irritating, as they tended to declare that the artist "transcended race and gender" without saying how they had done so, and actually I disagreed quite strongly that some of them did in fact do that, and not just ignore them, which is not at all the same thing. There were some pictures of showgirls on Broadway that I rather liked. Oh, and there was a HUGE robot in one room, which went all the way up to the ceiling and you could go and stand between its legs and look at all the metal. The Dean Gallery had a sort of library which I liked very much indeed, and I'm sorry that I have no academic interest in art so I can't go and use it. It was small, and the staircase sort of built itself into shelves that looked stuffed with interesting books.
I went to the Royal Academy exhibition, which had a lot of things that I wouldn't have on my walls if you paid me (mostly because I didn't like the colours), but which had won prizes. I've forgotten the name of the artist who did my favourite thing, even though I looked it up specially, which was of the Tower of Babel, with lots of rows of tiny elaborate silhouettes of people marching along and then winding their way up the tower and then some seemingly falling down from the top, all in black ink.
I have Plans to go to the Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery in one of the coming weekends, and I hope that when I'm in Glasgow for work I can sneak off to the Museum of Modern Art there too.
I saw Stone of Destiny, which is about people taking the stone of scone back from Westminster Abbey in the 1950s. They said at the start that they weren't going to have a Q&A, but instead they brought the director and four main actors up to the front just for us to look at, which was quite odd. I mean, we were just about to see a whole film with them in quite a bit. One of them said "remember, top right hand corner" and the audience laughed, but top right hand isn't the bit of the card you tear off if you want to say it's unmissable, and I don't know whether he didn't know or was telling us that it wasn't all that good. It was quite good, actually. It was a bit worthy, but possibly not if you're actually Scottish and not merely an English upstart sitting in a sea of clapping people at the end of a film about Scottish nationalism. Billy Boyd was in it, and Robert Carlyle, though they weren't among the people we got to look at at the start. It was very verdant, and apparently filmed in Vancouver. Bits of it, anyway. Probably not the Westminster Abbey exteriors, unless I'm making undue assumptions about Canadian architecture.
After a day's break I returned to see Dummy, which is about two boys whose mum dies, and the older one has to look after the younger, who is taking it rather well apart from dressing up a dummy in his mother's close and wig and making it tea. The two boys were very good indeed, and one of them is in Angus Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, which I am very much looking forward to seeing. It was very sad, but not wallowing in it, trying to show how grief was there all the time. There was a Q&A with the director and the two boys, which I can't remember anything about, other than that the woman leading it annoyed me by saying that the elder boy would have girls screaming at him in the streets soon, which I think is all-round offensive, so well done her. Oh, and when the director introduced it he said that he'd never had anyone pay to see a film of his before. Then I saw Love and Other Crimes, which is a Serbian film about the last day of a woman who is planning to steal money from her criminal boyfriend and leave her whole life behind forever. The director was there, and introduced it by saying that he didn't know what to tell us, except that it was one hundred minutes long, and he hoped we enjoyed it. Afterwards he was very animated, and when someone asked a good question, pointed at her and said delightedly "I like how you think!". He was very lovely indeed, and when someone asked about the possibility of a Serbian film without violence and sadness he promised that his next film would be a comedy, and pointed out that he had made a short film, which was about war, but no-one died, and it had a cow. I am not a little in love with him.
On Thursday I met up with
debodacious and equally charming daughter, and we went to see A Film With Me In It, which actually has Dylan Moran in it, and not me. It was ace. At first I wasn't at all sure about it, but it was very funny and fairly ingenious. There is a man who has three accidental deaths (and a dog) in his flat, and is concerned that no-one will believe him, so enlists his friend to help him sort it out. The Q&A had the director and three actors (including Dylan Moran), one of whom wrote the film.Friday was Transsiberian, which starred Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson, and also featured Ben Kingsley and Kate Mara. The slight downside of not really remembering synopses is that you can get a nasty surprise in the form of torture scenes. It was very good indeed, though I had to keep my eyes closed for a little bit. They're an American couple on the transsiberian express who meet up with a young couple, and then Emily Mortimer kills him after he seems to be about to rape her, then it turns out that they were drug runners and she's stuck with the heroin, then she confesses all to the police guy who is now sharing their cabin only it turns out that he's actually a rather awful criminal and they have to try and escape from a bunker in the snow with no shoes and then there's a train crash but then the army rescue them. This mostly happens all at once at the end, it seemed quite slow to start with. Emily Mortimer was there to introduce the film, and then a Q&A afterwards, but I was tired and a bit argh at the blood still, so I didn't stay for it.
On Saturday I saw Princess of Nebraska, a film about a Chinese girl studying in America who goes to San Francisco to have an abortion. She spends the night before her appointment at a party where the non-Chinese guests talk about what is wrong with China over her head, in a bar where she is temporarily a hostess entertaining businessmen with karaoke, in a hotel room with one of the hostesses, a beautiful woman who looks like the father of her baby but is unsurprisingly not keen on pretending to be, meeting a man to try and sell her baby for a high price, and then eventually at the appointment, where the worker talks to her about whether she has any way to keep the baby. I liked it - the girl wasn't all on top of everything and smart and knew what she wanted, she was young and a bit scared and in a country that was still very strange to her and far away from her family.
Finally, I saw Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, as part of the best of the fest thing on Sunday. I was not impressed. I don't know .how good the film is for people who haven't read the book, but it left me very cold, and was easily the worst thing I saw at the festival. Amy Adams was rather lovely as Miss LaForge, but while the bulk of the story was the same, they'd twisted things round that really spoilt it for me. Miss Pettigrew doesn't get sent somewhere by accident, she deliberately takes the card when the owner of the employment agency isn't looking, and misrepresents herself. Miss Pettigrew would never have done that. Also, when she is leaving her last post, she runs into a man (who later turns out to be Michael) and drops her suitcase and then runs away leaving it. She could never have brought herself to be so wasteful as to abandon her worldly possessions - then they have her eating at a soup kitchen place, which isn't the point at all, and I don't think it works. They also made Edith, who is kind if brusque and helps Miss Pettigrew to look nice, an evil woman who is Joe's fiancee through false pretences and snubs her. All the women were changed so that rather than being supportive when their own needs allow, and understanding of the things people need to do to survive, they're all cheating, callous, back-stabbing women...except of course Miss Pettigrew, who doesn't come across as quietly capable and morally centred, but rather stupid. So that was rather a disappointing way to end the film festival for me.
As of this week I will be back to making as much use of my Unlimited card as possible, as there are several films that came out while I was otherwise engaged that I'm looking forward to, like Secret Agents and The Edge of Love. I also want to see Teeth, although I think I was misinformed or just overly hopeful, as I thought that a horror about vagina dentata might be quite a feminist thing, but the trailer I last saw suggests otherwise. Still, it'll be something to do, since the television continues appalling.
And now there is but a month to wait until the Fringe and the Book festivals start, and I will have to spend it trying very hard not to buy tickets for everything I want, but to wait and see. I have tickets for my main desires - Debo, Posy Simmonds, Kristin Hersh and The Globe's Romeo and Juliet in the Botanic Gardens, and for the Fringe previews.
Shakespeare
I read The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels as a nice break, and then I decided to read the Bill Bryson book on Shakespeare (thanks, Lizzie!) to see where Antonia Forest might have got her source material from. And Ned's dead. I didn't know, and it quite upset me. He died at 27, which is probably not much past the end of the books. I hope he was still there when Nick came back from his voyage. Apparently he's buried in Southwark Cathedral, so I might try and see it next time I'm there.
I thought about Nick quite a lot when I was watching the histories last month, as we started with Richard II and he had to decide whether to inform, and then later with his Feeble not surprising anyone that he was willing to go to war (Feeble here was played by a woman), and having to deliver the lines even after having heard Anthony Merrick say it as his neck speech. I didn't know the histories (or indeed the history) very well, so I didn't follow all of it, exactly. But it was quite great. I remember there was a bit where lords slapped each other with gloves, and quite a lot of French nobles hanging around on ropes, and Katherine wasn't as awful as she mistly is, and the funny bits were funny, which is quite an achievement , considering. I was sitting next to some people who were also there for the entire series, and we started off saying "thank you" for letting each other past, and built up to friendly hellos each day and then I had quite a nice conversation between parts of Henry VIth with the man next to me about the interrelation between history and current politics, and the iniquities of university funding cuts, and whether or not disciplines truly had integrity that might be lost in interdisciplinary undergraduate work.
Art
The first weekend I was here I took myself off to the Museum of Modern Art and the Dean Gallery. They're right next to each other, and I can't remember what I saw in which, as they've merged somewhat in my head. There was an exhibit on maternity, and I liked some of the pieces (like the replica birthing doll), but the signs were very irritating, as they tended to declare that the artist "transcended race and gender" without saying how they had done so, and actually I disagreed quite strongly that some of them did in fact do that, and not just ignore them, which is not at all the same thing. There were some pictures of showgirls on Broadway that I rather liked. Oh, and there was a HUGE robot in one room, which went all the way up to the ceiling and you could go and stand between its legs and look at all the metal. The Dean Gallery had a sort of library which I liked very much indeed, and I'm sorry that I have no academic interest in art so I can't go and use it. It was small, and the staircase sort of built itself into shelves that looked stuffed with interesting books.
I went to the Royal Academy exhibition, which had a lot of things that I wouldn't have on my walls if you paid me (mostly because I didn't like the colours), but which had won prizes. I've forgotten the name of the artist who did my favourite thing, even though I looked it up specially, which was of the Tower of Babel, with lots of rows of tiny elaborate silhouettes of people marching along and then winding their way up the tower and then some seemingly falling down from the top, all in black ink.
I have Plans to go to the Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery in one of the coming weekends, and I hope that when I'm in Glasgow for work I can sneak off to the Museum of Modern Art there too.
