In the old days, I used to talk about films I'd seen. There have been an awful lot of awfully good movies recently. Earlier in the year, I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly free of charge, thanks to those nice Time Out people. I remember when the book came out and everyone was talking about it. I'm not sure what my image was but I never got round to reading it. What a mistake. The film is incredible and it inspired me to start reading French again, since it's a fairly short book and of course easier when you've just seen the film. I then read it in English so I've had three goes at it now.
In the past couple of weeks, I've been to see three films which were all great in different ways.
Wall-E gave me that special feeling of being in a noisy cinema full of giggling kids which falls completely silent when the film begins, and of course we're talking about an opening twenty minutes with practically no dialogue. The film then does lots of different things to you, lots of allusions for those in the know (I only partly follow them), and a winning mix of despair and hope, culminating in an unmissable, beautiful and positive end-title sequence.
Last week, I had a few hours to kill waiting for a train in Sheffield and crossed the road to the showcase cinema. It was toss-up between the Julian (Diving-Bell) Schnabel film of Lou Reed's Berlin and Mamma Mia You know which one I went for, right? I cried non-stop through the whole thing. As it finished, the woman behind me said 'That was a real feel good, wasn't it?' which I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with.
But I think the winner of the absolute-must-see-movie-award has to be Man on Wire which we saw last night. Absolutely incredible, and working on your mind in so many different ways afterwards. You have no choice but to see it in the cinema before it disappears. How long till it appears on a double bill with Man on Fire I wonder? Has anybody made Man on Tire yet?
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Following his recent mockery of Simon Mayo for pronouncing the first 'a' in Indiana Jones in the same way as posh people pronounce the 'a' in 'bath' (my hypothesis is that this might be to do with foreign word pronunciation, btw), I was really pleased to hear Mark Kermode starting his review of Wall-E by pointing out not only that it is not pronounced the same as 'wally' but that in fact anyone who's seen the film will find it hard not to say it in the same way as Wall-E himself does, before carrying on to talk pronunciation for large parts of the programme.
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]]>We had a quick bite with Holly and Anna on the way home and now we've just watched Toy Story which is still as good as it was the first time.
It was fun to go from the latest Pixar to the start of it all. I remember finding the cgi animation slightly weird when it was new but now we're so used to it that even the early one looks normal.
On a linguistic note, I'm a bit shocked at how many people are pronouncing 'Wall-E' as 'Wally'. Sigourney Weaver assured me on the radio it should be Wall followed by E rather than 'wally the word you use in England'. But the terrible 'please don't watch pirate movies' ad introduced him as 'Wally' and even Philip French told his readers that it's 'pronounced Wally' today. To be fair, it's not 100% clear given the way Wall-E pronounces other words in the film.
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]]>Hope we can get her back in the saddle soon,
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]]>We've just launched a new website on pragmatic stylistics where we'll be publishing news and discussions and other things that people think would be useful.
Let me know if you want to join in,
Billy
]]>You have to laugh, because it's true B-)
]]>I also enjoyed for once being in a cinema that fell into complete silence as the film began. And the hearty laugh of the guy in the front row. he made me think of that line in Woody Allen's philosophy:
'What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?'
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]]>But I thought I should log that I just witnessed a crow attacking a heron in Regent's Park. I was coming up to the gates where my route from town joins the inner circle, heard a squawking and screeching and looked up to see a very strange outline in the sky. It was a heron with wings and legs spread out randomly dropping towards me as if coming in to land. It righted itself and arrowed over my head pursued by an angry crow.
Earlier this year I heard woodpecker-like sounds two days in a row on my way to get the paper and decided to keep my eyes open on the way home. A spotted woodpecker was sitting on a tv aerial pecking away at it. Apoa saw it the next day so it obviously spent a few days there expressing itself.
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This looks good, even though their website doesn't work properly on my safari.
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Another cultural highlight this week was a screening of Once at the NFT. It's a great film and was followed by a Q&A and then a live music performance from the two lead actors ('musicians who can half act' rather than 'actors who can half sing or play music' as they described themselves). It's a great movie. Hope everyone else realises.
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]]>I'm a big fan of Brakes ever since I saw them supporting Belle and Sebastian and then started receiving their emails. They're always playing gigs in people's living rooms and things. I've never won one of those competitions but I did get an email last week about a secret gig at the Water Rats. They came on stage at 7.30 and there were around 20 of us in the room at the time. They played a fantastic short set and revealed that 'Heard About Your Band' is about Dominic Masters from The Others (hope they didn't think that was only OK if it was in front of the 20 of us - well, it crept up to about 50 by the end). Almost as good as a living-room gig. The volume was up to the level for a bigger gig, though, and my ears are still buzzing. It's going to be a bore when the hearing properly falls apart.
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