Old World Blues

Ho una gran voglia di Europa. Parigi, Berlino, Praga, Porto, Frankfurt, Roma, casa. Ho una gran voglia di viaggio culturale, musei, mostre, architettura, cinema. In pubblico studio Post-modernismo, psicanalisi Lacaniana nel cinema, Deleuze, Baudrillard. Ho fatto il pieno del meglio che il cinema Americano ha offerto negli ultimi dieci anni, e stasera mi sparo un Wenders post-9/11. Sono completamente immersa nel mio PhD, penso, studio, scrivo. Ma in segreto leggo Persepolis, vedo un film Turco-Tedesco, penso a Fellini, mi manca studiare Shakespeare. Tutta questa modernità isterica è un po' estenuante. Ho bisogno di palazzi vecchi, di strade piccole e scure con botteghe e officine, di Storia.

There Will Be Discussions

Volevo solo aggiungere, per chi fosse interessato, che non ho parlato qui di 'There Will Be Blood' perché stiamo facendo una fantastica e *serissima* discussione di là in casa Morgenstern. Mi pare aver imbrattato abbastanza spazio con la mia analisi, ma ribadirei che il film è un capolavoro e non riesco a smettere di pensarci. Se volete partecipare alla discussione accorrete numberosi. Non si dibatte di milkshakes, ma di Verga, fate un po' voi.

Technorati Tagged: I Drink Your Milkshake

Hot Fuzz 2: The Neighbour Returns

Indeed, she's back. We have been away to university on and off for a week and she hadn't been seen nor heard for some time. We had a dinner party last night and entertained our guests to no disturbance whatsoever from next door. The lights were off, nice and quiet. Happily we assumed that the ruthlessly efficient Met Police must have got hold of her, and she was now rotting in jail, but no, she appeared sharp on time at 8AM this morning. As any good Sopranos fan knows, it's not fun being in jail. We shouldn't even think things like that. Is this the end of the story? I'll keep you posted.
(We're three discs away from the end of The Sopranos: how will we ever carry on without Tony? Hopefully the neighbour won't be the one to provide us with the next scenes from a life of crime...)

Happy 80th, uncle Oscar

No point in trying to second-guess the American Academy; I'm leaving the prediction of results to thosemore attuned to the beat of Oscar's heart. Here instead is my Oscars wishlist:

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax)

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (Warner Bros.)

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Ellen Page in "Juno" (A Mandate Pictures/Mr. Mudd Production)

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There" (The Weinstein Company)

Best animated feature film of the year
"Persepolis" (Sony Pictures Classics): Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Achievement in art direction
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax): Art Direction: Jack Fisk; Set Decoration: Jim Erickson

Achievement in cinematography
"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (Warner Bros) Roger Deakins

Achievement in costume design
"Elizabeth: The Golden Age" (Universal) Alexandra Byrne

Achievement in directing
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax), Paul Thomas Anderson

Achievement in film editing
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax): Dylan Tichenor

Best foreign language film of the year
"12" Russia (dir NIkita Michalkhov)

Achievement in makeup
"La Vie en Rose" (Picturehouse) Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
N/A in protest: IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN JESSE JAMES!! (Nick Cave and Warren Ellis)

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
"Falling Slowly" from "Once" (Fox Searchlight) Music and Lyric by Glen Hansard and: Marketa Irglova

Best motion picture of the year
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax) A JoAnne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Company Production: JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Lupi, Producers

Achievement in sound editing
"No Country for Old Men" (Miramax and Paramount Vantage): Skip Lievsay

Achievement in sound mixing
"No Country for Old Men" (Miramax and Paramount Vantage): Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland

Adapted screenplay
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax), Written for the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson

Original screenplay
"Juno" (A Mandate Pictures/Mr. Mudd Production), Written by Diablo Cody

Frankly I'm sad that two of my films of the year 2007 weren't even nominated (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Eastern Promises), but we're lucky, uncle Oscar. Yes, I agree that Atonement is a bit of a turkey, but at least there's no danger of Chicago making off with the most statuettes...

Technorati Tagged: Oscars

Hot Fuzz?

The Police came again today around 8AM. Five men, one woman and a van. They knocked on our neighbour's door for a quarter of an hour. Nobody answered, so they left. It's been a week since their first visit, and all they are doing is knocking on the door waiting for someone to give themselves up. Maybe the neighbour didn't hear them: she has odd sleeping patterns (probably to do with the drug-related crime) so she may have been comatose at that ungodly time of the day, and she clearly suffers from hearing problems, as we have ascertained after months and months of loud music-playing at whatever time of the day. She also wasn't born yesterday, and she has been in jail before, so she may be in hiding somewhere, you know, in a basement or under the bed. But she has just left the flat as I type this, so obviously she was in this morning when the police came. Maybe she thought it was Jeovah's Wintesses and chose not to open the door. I am very disappointed, it's definitely not the way it happens in movies. She would be way out in Mexico by now.

Update 3.50pm: Neighbour is back with dodgy bloke. Police nowhere in sight.
Update 5.52pm: Neighbour maybe out again. Police have just come back.

Technorati Tagged: Neighbours, or a Life of Crime; Met Police; London Life; You Oughta be in Pictures

'I'm dealing with things way above my maturity levels'

The police have come knocking on the door four times in the past week, to ask questions about our very strange neighbours. It's not quite clear to us whether they are dealing drugs or have abducted a child, but the situation is not terribly relaxed.
The library got flooded today - unfortunately neither the words: 'They made me do it', nor Jake Gyllenhaal were anywhere in sight.
This morning I woke up from a nightmare in which I was told I would become gradually paralysed and would only be able to bat my eyelids to communicate with the world. Then I realised I was dreaming and struggled very hard to wake up and get, but I had the very upsetting feeling that my body didn't respond to my will as if I was really paralysed. Horrendous.
No, I haven't seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and I have no intention to do so at this point.
Don't get me started about Atonement getting the big BAFTA.
Thank God for Juno. It just made me wanna get my old stripey t-shirts and battered All Stars from their boxes, and dig out those grunge ripped jeans, grab hold of my guitar and sing along to The Moldy Peaches. After four months of watching really violent, tragic, depressing, dirty pictures, it was a breath of fresh air.


Technorati Tagged: Nightmares; Our Neighbours, or a Life of Crime; Juno

El Público - Strike Part 2

PRESTIDIGITADOR. ¿Y qué teatro puede salir de un sepulcro?
DIRECTOR. Todo el teatro sale de las humedades confinadas. Todo el teatro verdadero tiene un profundo hedor de luna pasada. Cuando los trajes hablan, las personas vivas son ya botones de hueso en las paredes del calvario. Yo hice el túnel para apoderarme de los trajes y, a través de ellos, haber enseñado el perfil de una fuerza oculta cuando ya el público no tuviera más remedio que atender, lleno de espíritu y subyugado por la acción.
PRESTIDIGITADOR. Yo convierto sin ningún esfuerzo un frasco de tinta en una mano cortada llena de anillos antiguos.
DIRECTOR. (Irritado.) Pero eso es mentira, ¡eso es teatro! Si yo pasé tres días luchando con las raíces y los golpes de agua fue para destruir el teatro.
PRESTIDIGITADOR. Lo sabía.
DIRECTOR. Y demostrar que si Romeo y Julieta agonizan y mueren para despertar sonriendo cuando cae el telón, mis personajes, en cambio, queman la corona y mueren de verdad en presencia de los espectadores. Los caballos, el mar; el ejército de las hierbas lo han impedido. Pero algún día, cuando se quemen todos los teatros, se encontrará en los sofás, detrás de los espejos y dentro de las copas de cartón dorado, la reunión de nuestros muertos encerrados allí por el público. ¡Hay que destruir el teatro o vivir en el teatro! No vale silbar desde las ventanas. Y si los perros gimen de modo tierno hay que levantar la cortina sin prevenciones.
[Federico Garcia Lorca, El Público, Cuadro Quinto]

That's it: 'You have to destroy the theatre or live in the theatre! It's not fair hissing from the windows'. I am not prepared to do either so I got out. After another night at the theatre I can rest assured it was the right decision. (The show at the National is very interesting, by the way.)

Technorati Tagged: Federico Garcia Lorca; El Publico; Theatre

Strike

I have been on a theatre strike for over eighteen months now. This is not a picket line, cardboard placard, fist-waving, slogan-chanting kind of strike. It's a quiet contemplation that I had begun to get more disappointment form theatre than joy, and it was time to take a break. And also, partly, an acknowledgement that I simply wasn't getting my money's worth. For a whole decade of my life I had been going to the theatre twice or three times a week. I saw everything. I drank it all up. Admittedly, I saw a lot of rubbish, but I loved it, I believed in it. I believed, with the blindness of passion, that one could live the theatre, I thought that if I breathed enough dusty air in a small black box studio I would become part of it. No matter how hard I tried, I think deep down I remained a critic. There was always too much I processed, raged against, and criticised, for it to really become my life. So, quietly, without declaration, I decided to slowly abandon my passion and take a lover. Or rather, to return to my first lover, to a place in the dark. While in theatre I strived for unachievable perfection, here I admitted defeat, I knew from the start that this seduction was the fruit of an eyesight incomaptibility. That the cinema is only possible because it is an illusion, the apparently seamless, continuous flow of images before my eyes was only possible because of a natural human defect. Suddenly, in this somewhat soil of failure, possibilities began to blossom. All was illusion and yet no illusion. All clear from the start - no empty promises, but an initial pact: I will love you but we will never live together. I might betray you, but I will always come back. Free love. I was free to be a critic because I never wanted to live in cinema, for cinema, toward cinema. I have never wanted to be a film director, an actor, a writer. And so I am a free viewer - free to love it, free to hate it. No more investment than the few hours I spend in the dark room with my illusionary world.

Since we came back from Washington, I have crossed the picket line six times: Lev Dodin's Maly Theatre Platonov, the Cheek by Jowl's Three Sisters and Cymbeline, Complicite's A Disappearing Number, and a Michael Frayn farce, Donkey's Years - purely for the sake of friendship, and Headlong's Angels in America. (Note the distinct lack of Shakespeare - maybe because he is the hardest to be hurt by? Pas de Shakespeare, moi?) No matter how much I enjoyed certain aspects of these shows (in particular Platonov, the baby-masterpiece of Anton Chekhov, and Angels, a play I adore), I was proven right each time. Always more disappointment than joy. Tomorrow night, I will put down my striking hat again and walk to the mighty concrete temple on the Thames to see a play with a mysterious and ominous title: The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. To think that there was such a time! I am terrified of what it will feel like walking into a Lyttelton theatre full of my memories and ghosts - Private Lives of Life x 3, Mournings that may become Electra, or Iphigenia at Aulis - but wouldn't become me, wouldn't make us Three Sisters - Measure for Measure of that stage full of Owen Meany's shrieks, Streetcars Named Desire travelling to No Man's Land, Winter Tales of Pillowmen and History Boys, Anything Goes... Will I Look Back in Anger?

Technorati Tagged: Life in the Theatre; Life in Motion Pictures

2 February

2 February, one of my favourite days in the year.
It's the anniversary of a performance of 'Twelfth Night' at Middle Temple Hall in 1602, at the presence of Her Maiestie Queene Elizabeth I. In the cast, a certain William Shaksper.
It's ten minutes to kick off of the Rugby Six Nations Tournament.
In Italy it's the Candelora so we'll be making pancakes after Ireland v Italy. The pitch looks wonderful in Croke Park. The possibility of the usual slaughter is upon us, but for now it's all very exciting.
The Groundhog of Pennsylvania proclaims six more weeks of Winter. We don't have a copy of the glorious Groundhog Day so we'll be off to the cinema tonight, and the farmers' market tomorrow. I love a quiet weekend.

Not Reading Lolita in England

"An online campaign by a group of mothers has forced Woolworths to withdraw a line of bedroom furniture for girls called 'Lolita'.Staff, it appears, had no idea of the sexual connotations of the name.Woolworths initially appeared baffled and refused to withdraw the product, saying in addition to the family market it also had to "respond to customer demands and follow current trends". After a quick investigation they changed their minds.
A spokesman for the company said: "What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now." [from the ever so wonderful Daily Mail]

Technorati Tagged: This is England, Lolita