From tomorrow, the Eurostar says goodbye to its cramped Waterloo confines and moves into 5-star accommodation at the gloriously restored Kings Cross St.Pancreas. The first train out is dubbed Tread Lightly, a reference to its carbon-neutral footprint.
BBC2 TV series starting tonight- The 800 Million Pound Railway Station
The miracle of St Pancras
Waterloo sunset
But to whom will it make a difference? The London underground lines are still plagued with ‘signal failure’ as an excuse for poor service pretty much every second day. And the supposedly ‘good service’ on the Piccadilly line this morning left me standing in the cold for 15 minutes and missing my meeting. And Transport for London never even coughed up the refund from about 10 forms I filled in. Delays are so frequent for the commuting denizens of Richmond (District line) that they’ve probably given up all hope of things getting better. At times it’s almost as if someone were sabotaging the whole system. Either that, or if the system is truly in such a bad state of repair, those 2012 Olympics had better worry. I don’t want to sound churlish about the King’s Cross refurb at all. But you’d be halfway to Paris by the time your tube, taxi or bus was able to dump you at your London destination. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hoverglide off our heels through the London air?
And the mucho misery Silverlink line...
Ken Livingston and the Silverlink handover
London Overground, A new overland circle line is to be created by 2010
Computer failure leads to 'chaos' at Gatwick
Heathrow voted world's least favourite airport
One of the best docos of the Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF), and winner of this year’s The Grierson Trust prize for best full-length doco, pops up on More4 digital TV tonight, Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (Problemat s komarite i drugi istorii) from Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov. It is so funny and poignant it really deserves a much wider audience than this TV slot. It’s almost surreal realism and juxtaposition of stories from Belene and the Belene Islands is a bit reminiscent of Errol Morris’ doco Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. “You can wipe out any species except mosquitoes,” says one local. “That’s what we’re rich in, mosquitoes!” A Cuban worker at the nuclear power plant plays guitar in a field of red poppies, some learn to dance the proper Viennese waltz (180 steps a minute), a horse gallops freely through the former Communist concentration camp, the best use of the Shostakovich waltz I’ve heard as the trucks insecticide the streets, while some laconic locals watch the tourist boat glide down the river, “why go down a trip on the Danube just to be eaten by mosquitoes?”
Also tonight (at the same time) is BBC2 TV –Imagine: a profile the artist Louise Bourgeois whose Tate Modern exhibition I wrote about last time.
Fast track: Europe's rail revolution
And once you’ve escaped London for the new Albion of Europe check out Michael Palin’s BBC TV series and book New Europe.
Our Into the Wild hero obviously never met the Alaskan vampires of 30 Days of Night, vampiric heaven as the sun doesn’t rise for 30 days in winter Barrow. This is a really scary horror flic from director David Slade. No Weirdsville jollies here, and it’s no mean feat to bring to life this genre. The only cavil is that the evil ones’ characters just aren’t fleshed out thus missing the opportunity to explore the origins of collective evil.
Nosferatu: Resurrection of the vampire
If your weekend date is a couch potato then Second Sight's DVDs of the Karloff/Lugosi combo The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935) are for you (mid-price, no extras). Great prints of these must-see classics, and don’t you just love the string score swathes of mashy Brahms, Liszt and Tchaikovsky.
And, of course, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror that was initially part of the failed US release ‘grindhouse’ double-bill with Tarantino’s Deathproof. Rodriguez cancelled his LFF talk, but the film is definitley nothing to be ashamed of. You have to be into comedy/horror gore, though, or be particularly pissed off with a current or ex-date to enjoy this movie. If you’re the latter, you’ll be cheering the one-legged Cherry (Rose McGowan) as she massacres the gangrenous evil ones with her other machine gun peg-leg. If that doesn’t get rid of your unwanted one, you could always try Abel Ferrara’s Ms.45 aka Angel of Vengeance (1980).
Metropolitan police to hold London shootings ceasefire summit
Probably better not to take a blind date of either sex to see Anna M (released this weekend). French director Michel Spinosa researched his loopy girl Anna (riveting Isabelle Carré) obsessed with happily married Dr.Andre (Gilbert Melki) on the clinical pathological jealousy studies La jalousie amoureuse by Daniel Lagache. This film could seem familiar turf, Fatal Attraction or even French revenge flic Love in the Strangest Way(Elles N'Oublient pas). But because Spinosa’s direction never sensationalises or overtly dramatises the story it’s a terribly disturbing film bordering on the documenatational. Moreover, Alain Duplantier’s stunning use of anamorphic widescreen cinematography uses the unique depth of field nature of that lens to make Anna (and therefore Dr. Andre) the centre of the screen canvas wherever the location. “I place Anna in the heart of a big city so she would be lost in unknown territory...an outsider in the wrong place,” said the director. “Mystics and erotomanianiacs have the same symptoms. For them, everything starts with an illumination; the imperious and indisputable sense of being chosen...convinced they have a unique relationship with the other person.”
And anyone for the LFF’s Japanese killer hair movie from director/writer Sion Sono Exte - Hair Extensions (Ekusute). Bravura direction and a subtle (or possibly blatantly obvious if you’re Japanese) commentary on the hair obsessions of young Japanese girls.
Hairdresser sued in row about headscarf
Going even further back in time is actor/director Erich von Stroheim’s very first film from 1919 Blind Husbands (Die Rache der Berge/Blinde Ehemänner) in a magnificently restored print screened with Neil Brand’s piano accompaniment at the LFF. The greatest silent films, as seen here, were nothing to do mime and everything to do with the birth of subtle film acting. Thrilling mountaineering sequence (though obviously not Touching the Void). Find a large TV, get the DVD and cajole an improv pianist friend to conjure an evening date that you’ll remember!
Canadian director Guy Maddin, has made an entire career out of re-inventing the silent movie. Brand Upon the Brain! (LFF) has seen most of the festival circuit and like most of his auteurship defies description. If you’re a fan this won’t be so thrilling or revelatory, but if not, you’re never going to see anything else like Maddin in the cinema. A lighthouse is both family home and orphanage with children bearing strange head wounds.
American indie Wristcutters: A Love Story finally gets its UK release on Nov. 23 (Raindance Fest hit of 2006). Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (after-life passport mix-up). A black comedy about suicide with a great Tom Waits cameo, too. Catch Me When My Crumpled Angel. "I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel director of controversial Golden Gate suicides doco The Bridge (ICA DVD).
Wristcutters interview with director Goran Dukic.
Husband and wife team Etgar Keret (Wristcutters was based on one of his short stories) and Shira Geffen have directed Jellyfish (Meduzot) (Zeitgeist in the States)
screened at LFF and as part of the UK Jewish Film Fest tonight (15 Nov) at the Everyman in Hampstead (oh how I fondly remember those art-house repertory screenings). This is another film about lost souls this time set in Tel Aviv. But the directors wanted to find a Tel Aviv that hadn’t been seen before and used the very subtle cinematography of Antoine Héberlé(winner of this year’s Cannes Fest Camera d’Or for the film). “The characters are under the illusion that they can design their own destinies. But the reality is that they wander like jellyfish. In the end some will overcome the forces that determine their lives. They will make their own way down to the water’s edge.”
Ploy (LFF) by Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is about lost married souls and the search for something else. It’s perfectly crafted like a seductive thriller as the camera stalks its way through a luxury hotel in Bangkok. Young Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) is waiting in the bar that morning for her mother arriving from Stockholm. Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) platonically invites her to rest in his room much to his wife’s outrage. There are other hotel rooms with other goings-on. A low droning soundtrack perhaps adds more menace than strangeness drowning the film in a little too much atmosphere.
Valzer (LFF) by Italian director Salvatore Maira is a tour de force as the entire film is shot in a single take with the camera weaving in and out of the lies, hopes, and frustrations of a Roman hotel’s occupants. Maira was inspired by the architecture of two Roman churches: “And I imagined a unique place, where architectural space becomes emotional.”
Days and Clouds (Giorni e Nuvole) directed by Silvio Soldini explores a couple and the husband’s middle-aged, middle-class unemployment in Genoa. As the director said after the totally packed Sat night LFF screening, “it’s a snapshot of something that’s happening more and more and that people don’t really want to recognise.” Antonio Albanese (Michele the job seeking husband) is better known as a comedian in Italy, but here is beautifully understated as he struggles to keep up optimism and appearances, as even one of his old friends blatantly lies about having repaid Michele the money he’d loaned his friend. Soldini chose Genoa because of the dialectic between the couple’s claustrophobia (they used to travel abroad often) and the sea and its horizon. Genoa is also the setting for one of my favourite operas Verdi’s Simon Boccenegra, the tale of a plebian pirate who rises to become Doge, the city’s ruler, only to find the struggle for power is the same as that for the sea. Was Verdi the Ken Livingstone of opera? Italian unifier Garibaldi wrote in 1880: “Mine has been a tempestuous life, made up – like most people’s I believe – of good and evil. I may say that I have always sought the good, for myself and for my fellow men. If on any occasion I have done evil, I have done so involuntarily.”
More LFF tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow with my petit pace...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment