Busy?

It turns into a catalogue - I can't write about it all. Thursday night went to see Kicking a deaad horse in the Peacock with Stephen Rea. I liked the horse. I bought the play to read it afterwards - I kind of missed what he was saying towards the end. I think he was knackered. Whenever I break my rule about seeing plays in the first two weeks I'm disappointed. Most people found his performance compelling but the play shit. In the pub on Saturday they were saying it was written in the 80s and sat in his drawer - he knew it wasn't good. So I didn't pop over to Sam Shepard in the pub and say hi, I mean if I'd loved the thing I would have.
Friday went to see Indigenes at the IFI, about Algerian soldiers fighting for France in WWII. Afterwards had tagines and Alsation riesling in respect (the film ends up in Alsace, they are fighting alone for a French village where the inn is called Sonntag and the snow is coming down). Fine film, very emotional.
Saturday evening went to see Joanna Newsom live in the Olympia and she was absolutely phenomenal, I think it's the first night of her current tour with a small scale band. All of whom were annoyingly young and gifted. Everything she does from playing the harp, to singing in an 'ickle gurl voice (she talks like that too) to using words like 'spelunking', 'dirigibles' and 'ledger' (though in fairness it does rhyme in the song...) should annoy me but I think she's a genius. Actually, I love the word dirigible. It's a privilege to be in the same room as someone when they turn it on like that. A real fucking privilege. She totally blew me away. Did a good long show too. After went to the pub and everyone had seen the play... that's when we saw Sam in the pub by the way.

Sunday went to seen Nanni Moretti's new film The Caiman about which nothing should be said and in the evening on to Sunshine Danny Boyle's pastiche of 2001, Solaris, and Event Horizon. Did I mention Silent Running? That too. I loved it. Particularly the bits where not much happened, but then I think that if Solaris was twice as long, and half as much happened, it would be four times as good. Which is kind of the opposite of most people's opionions. But it was kind of ruined at the end when Sam Neill's character from Event Horizon turns up all burnt skin and the movie briefly follows slasher conventions. I find them tedious in the extreme. There is not a film that I have seen where the baddie defies logic, physics, and good writing to repeatedly return from the dead to terrorise the people in the movie that I haven't despised as I was watching. Think of something like Cape Fear where that gurning oaf masquerading as an actor won't just fuck off and die... Anyway, I liked the film's abstract noise, liminal images, and grand gothic doom laden aura. I found it gripping and frightening. I found the acceptance and even craving for death believable and refreshing for a film such as this. The people I was with were less enthused.
Caught the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition in there sometime too. It was alright.

Staircase wit

The cold snap that traditionally accompanies paddy's day has just ended, proof that while god doesn't exist he does hate us so very much, and the spring birds are singing merrily. And is that early chicks I hear in the attic space above me? And we just discovered that the only way Ireland would win a cricket game against a test nation is by foul means. Not necessarily ours - but this is the foulest, most sordid sports story I have ever encountered...

Anyway, watched "the consequences of love" the other night and really enjoyed it. It had a sedate, hypnotic pace and only became less good in the last third when things started happening. The director wasn't so good at that. Then again Tarkovsky was no John Woo and that's no bad thing. Other people have compared it to Sophia Coppolla, and my Beloved and I both thought of lost in translation but it was far less crass than that film. And deliciously morbid too. And a powerful argument for the quotidien blandness of days going by, endlessly, pulling you into the future.
Perhaps we enjoyed it so much partially as it began with pictures of escalators (or more properly moving sidewalks) and blank industrial spaces and bland hotels and we had just been to see Thomas Demand's L'esprit d'escalier exhibition at IMMA. He makes sculptures out of paper, mdf, plastic and photographs these sculptures into luscious huge prints. The subjects are frequently semi-industrial bland areas: a stock office in a warehouse, a stock room for a shop, a lift, an indescribable yellow machine in a factory. At first the pictures look like the real thing and then you notice that the steel stairway spiralling around the machine is painted on; that while the untreated MDF shelves are real the office is in fact largely paint, and the phones sitting on the desk lack buttons and numbers; the balconies coming out of the building are simply corrugated cardboard.

Don't bother with the Alex Katz New York exhibition on at the same venue - NY toffs drawing pictures of each other. They should print them in the New Yorker. Or something. In case you didn't know I despise as contemptible the graphic style of the New Yorker and it old world pretentiousness "from our correspondant in Tallinn". Ick.

Gainsbourg pour vouz

Godzilla

Put on the new, restored, clean, old version of Godzilla for a film society last night. I've never seen the version that has normally been shown in English language countries. Apparantly it is bowdlerised with all the references to nuclear weapons taken out and a Basil Exposition style American reporter shoehorned in to make sense of the plot (those ker-azy Japanese!) when its point has been removed. It's an interesting film. Its pace is very different to what you might expect, more measured than a shocker. Right from the titles there was tension with the overture having surprisingly good manipulated concrete monster noises all over it. As the tension was being built up people on trains and on the street alluded to the misery of the Japanese war experience 'I can't be killed by Godzilla, not after my escape in Nagasaki', 'Tokyo will be evacuated' 'not again'. My favourite was the one-eyed mad scientist with an eye patch. When told by a reporter that their man in Switzerland had heard from his friend in Germany that he had a weapon that would kill Godzilla he took a step back, hand clutching something to his breast while his eye darted wildly around the room 'I have no friends in Germany...'

As expected the special effects weren't great. They weren't bad either. The rubber suit was surprisingly good and some of the model making, particularly of large buildings as they came apart, shedding masonry, was extraordinarily good. It's just that the movie became a spectacle movie two thirds of the way through and that is the kind of film that lasts the shortest before it seems dated. I didn't mind it but one of my companions found the devestation scenes boring.

Anyway, Gojira was destroyed by an alternative to a nuclear weapon invented by the mad scientist. So as an anti-war and anti science supporting war film it was a touch flawed. The mad scientist had the sense to self immolate in the act of killing the monster - V for Vendetta style - at the end. Those with the ability to destroy monsters have no place in a monster free society.

Happy thanksgiving from the no-control room!

I meant to write an entry last Friday. Only thing was it was supposed to be about the premiere of Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price that I was hosting last Thursday night. I had planned to have somebody from Impact (the retail workers union) and Tesco (which is the closest to Wal-Mart here) and to be completely ignored by Lidl and Aldi, and maybe somebody from Superquinn to try and have a different tack on supermarkets. I thought it would be a great antidote to that simpleton Eddie _!_ Hobbes and his series of programmes that managed to convince most people here that the problems with prices in Ireland were all to do with tax and that if we all had an Aldi nearby our money problems would be over. Like grocery prices are really the deal rather than non-productive assets (say land for example). Like Irish farmers are actually getting a reasonable price for quality product. Like supermarkets are ever an economically sensible place to buy fresh food, fresh meat, fresh fish, or anything healthy. Seriously, they do all these programmes about the varying cost of items. Hobbes went on about how a LidlAldi in every town would be the saviour of housewives. Did he ever pop into a local greengrocer and have a deco at the prices? And the quality is of course incomparable. Food might actually taste of something if you buy it in the greengrocer, or if you want to pay supermarket prices, in your local organic market. And that's without thinking about food miles and other issues that you may want to consider that go beyond cost and quality. But Eddie _!_ Hobbes successfully campaigned to get the groceries order revoked thus ensuring Tesco's complete domination over this country (and the filling of our roads with monstermotherfuckingtrucks that they can't actually deal with and the levying of huge tolls and another round of taxation to pay for the road upgrades to make Tesco richer). I felt this film would be very relevant in Ireland with the impending IBEC led collapse of social partnership and Irish Ferry's hilariously blatent contempt for its workers, the government, and of course all of us. You're never getting on one of their ferries again, right?

Anyway, I began to get suspicious as the promo materials didn't arrive. Last Thursday dawned, dull and dreary (actually it was bright and sunny at dawn as it has been for the last while till the fogs rolled in) and still no sign of the film. A disasterous day looked like happening. I was thinking of showing Robert Greenwald's previous film 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's was on journalism' but then I remembered that it was only the second best film about a satellite news channel that I and my Beloved saw at the documentary film festival that year. So we showed 'Control room' about Al Jazeera instead. This turned out also to be topical given the current revelations about the US's willingness to bomb their headquarters (they of course bombed their bureaux in Afghanistan - nearly killing the puppet Karzai - and in Baghdad - killing a journalist but ensuring that their all important spin on the invasion of Baghdad was the only one out there). There were all sorts of organisational nightmares but it went well enough, I was just bitterly disappointed that we let people down, including those that came via the film's website to the only showing in Ireland. They've been in touch and when the film actually arrives we'll be able to have a full showing and do lots of publicity. Hope to see you there.

Physical Theatre

I couldn't count the amount of times I've heard people say that theatre in Dublin is bad as there's no physical theatre. And let's not talk about the odd time I read the papers (refusing to get the Irish Times means that at least I'm spared the mantra from them). I have a problem with this. I don't have a problem with 'physical', or dance theatre, or theatre of movement yada yada yada, I have a problem with the assumed primacy of it. Just as I have a problem with 'pure' cinema. Hitchcock may be pure cinema, as Truffaut said the second last of the masters, only Welles arriving in the era of sound when text took over and people lost their visual purity, but just watch him in a real theatre with real normal people rather than a film studies class and see the difference. I can appreciate Hitchcock when I read about him or watch how he puts a scene together, but when you are in a crowd his films are frankly embarrassing. His misogyny is crass beyond belief and, on the two occasions I have gone to see rep presentations, both in crowded cinemas, the audience giggled and finally laughed out loud at the picture. Another example, from a lesser director, I watched a TV version of Dr. Zhivago a couple of years ago, and I thought of the different choices made in presentation from David Lean's. David Lean's version had a scene where Lara was in a horse drawn carriage with the older man, he tried to kiss her, cut to the Hussars drawing swords, the carriage starts bouncing, the hussars charge the protest march, carriage bouncing, hussars crack heads, blood stains the snow. Okay, so I know she was raped and was a virgin, in the TV version it was made explicit that this was the case - rather than some kind of visual allusion which merely trivialises.