Wednesday 30 March 2011

Marcel the Shell

Found out about this phenomenal little dude yesterday.
Now 900% in love.


via YouTube.

Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp and voiced by Jenny Slate.

Monday 28 March 2011

Lent...

So...

I gave up Facebook for Lent.
And Twitter.
And broadcast television.
And suddenly I seem to have endless evenings in which to...

Watch films.
And make films.

But mostly watch them.

Why, just this evening I watched The Virgin Suicides while doing the ironing when usually I'd be catatonic in front of two episodes of Home and Away.

Anyway... I've recently started getting into Hitchcock.
I took a modular degree in film studies (with writing) 13 years ago (weep) and maybe watched Rebecca and North by Northwest. Rebecca stuck with me, NBNW not so much... except for the well-known bi-plane over a cornfield scene...

So. A few weeks ago I had a sudden urge to go back to Manderley... and revisit Rebecca.


Mrs Danvers. Creepy as.
Rebecca led to The Birds.


Which led to Psycho.




(Which, call me flighty, shallow and missing the point, led to "OK, his name is now a buzzword for psychopathic, but is it wrong to find Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates moderately attractive, vulnerable and misunderstood?" O-K.)

But seriously. What is a shame about viewing Hitchcock's films, now, as a contemporary viewer, is that while it's perfectly possible to see how suspenseful they could be, and how clever, and how advanced the visual technology (in The Birds especially), they may not have aged well... or rather we have not allowed them to. We are so used to having our films spell out in graphic detail the extent of the horror that we are likely not to be shocked when the violence is suggested.

That said... The sound of thousands of cawing birds, and the manic flapping of wings... that is genuinely terrifying.

And in other spurious film news... I also watched The Girl on the Train on Saturday night.


Quick plot outline: Jeanne is in her twenties, living with her widowed mother (perennially fabulous Catherine Deneuve) and rollerblading through urban Paris. She is reluctantly pursued by the charming wrestler Franck, and leaves the safety of her mother's home to live with him. But when the relationship is blown apart by deception, Jeanne makes a play for attention by claiming that she has been hurt in an anti-Semitic attack. The nation -- and the president -- make Jeanne a poster-girl for victimisation, but a perceptive thirteen-year-old Jewish boy, Nathan, and his grandfather -- Jeanne's mother's old flame -- are able to see through her lie.

Probably not the most radical film to come out of France in recent years, but it has a dynamism and a fluidity aided by the scenes of Jeanne and Franck rollerblading.

Sunday 20 March 2011

Boot Fair Booty

My blogging and diarising are falling by the wayside at the moment... too much else going on. *sad, bag-eyed face*

However, I made it to a boot fair last Sunday with my friend who was visiting from Spain, and for a £1, yes, ONE WHOLE POUND, managed to pick up this little beauty, a Polaroid 1000 Land Camera!


Also managed to pick up a mini slide viewer, an instructional book on photography, a cute red ASOS blouse, and two vintage advertising prints -- one from the 1930s, one from the 1950s -- but this was my major coup. I have no-o-o-o-o idea if it even works (and nor did the guy selling it) but it's so flipping cute, what's not to love? Will pay a visit to The Impossible Project to pick up some film, methinks.

Thursday 10 March 2011

Give me somebody to dance for, give me somebody to be!

(Lyrics: Let Me Dance for You | Chorus Line, 1985)

Finally, finally, I jumped on the Black Swan bandwagon on Sunday evening having wanted to see the film for a-g-e-s; and I really rather enjoyed it. I'm not saying it was the best film ever made in the history of fabulous films but there was a certain intensity and vulnerability to Nina that was consistently believable no matter how outlandish her imaginings became.

There were some sublimely ridiculous moments that only felt acceptable once it was clear these were figments of Nina's shattering imagination; there were also some moments of profound clarity. The theme of control was dominant; Nina was excessively controlled by her mother, by the ballet company, and by herself, although her grip on that control loosened dramatically; ultimately the element of her psyche that had given in to the Black Swan was her controller.

Incidentally the casting of Barbara Hershey and Natalie Portman as mother and daughter is smart and intuitive; the two look alike for a start, and have the same stony fragility that would lead one to believe that Nina has been forged in her mother's image.

And here is a lovely trailer, gleaned from the Casa de YouTube:



Black Swan got me thinking about another dance film I love...

Staying Alive.

Yes, Sylvester Stallone's seminal commentary on... staying alive; the sequel to Saturday Night Fever; set five years on from Tony Manero's first, legendary outing.

(Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in this tribute is borne of genuine affection!)


(uploaded to YouTube by chakasmoothjazz)

This scene is fabulous (and here it's dubbed in Spanish, awesome!) -- let's disregard the fact that the same dance steps are performed in the film in sequence over... and over... and over... sometimes in slow-mo.


Things to love in this scene especially:

Cynthia Rhodes' casually archetypal 80s get-up at the start of the scene (that beret!)

Screengrab from DVD

The kitsch cityscape stage set (I wanted this on my bedroom wall, no joke)
The kitsch city jazz score
Finola Hughes' hair-dancing
The line: "Got any messages? ...It's an inside joke."

And earlier, the line: "Guys like you aren't relationships, you're exercise!" from this hardcore rock chick with her simu-sartorial friend:

Screengrab from DVD
This film = the reason I love the 1980s.