Flaming desire

Perhaps the Olympic torch had other uses! This week's closure of an underground station due to staff burning their toast was- what can one say, very, very British. A Greek by the name of Paximos may have invented toast when he realized that toasted bread lasted longer while traveling. He was a Hellenistic author of books on Boetica, farming, sexual positions, dyeing, and cookery. And Andrew Dalby (Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece) cites Claudius Galen as first using the word Paximadia in his Handy Remedies. So old Paximos (or maybe he was a sprightly Olympic athlete as well) inspired a biscuit. Maybe one should set up an interactive new underground station called Burnt Toast to highlight the challenges faced by London's transport system.

There hasn't been much of an amazing bunch of film releases the last month or so but Greek film Dogtooth is the closest anyone's come recently to Pier Paolo Pasolini's brutal, comic, sadistic view of the world. Far more acutely so than even Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime. Low budget Crying with Laughter (great HD camera work) was somewhat of a quiet gem at last year's Raindance Film Fest. The final pay-off doesn't quiet reap rewards for the viewer but with performances and production values such as exhibited here, it definitely flies the Scottish flag for the future of Brit film. Next week's much talked about release (London Film Fest last year, Tornoto, and this week at Tribeca) The Disappearance of Alice Creed is the first big splash for new UK distributor Cinema NX. Writer/directer J Blakeson offers up fairly routine hostage thriller fare (in comparison say to the Wachowski brothers' Bound) but it's all in a very classy tin that is certain to get Blakeson's calls returned in Hollywood.

For another closed world one could try No Greater Love Michael Whyte's doco on the Carmelite monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill (founded in 1878). Same distributor Soda Pictures release this week.La Danse looking at the lives of the Paris Opera Ballet. American doco filmmaker and chronicler of the world Frederick Wiseman (given a MoMA retrospective this year in New York) chooses to film life without music, without voice over while editing as little as possible. But perhaps even more fascinating was his 1995 Ballet profiling American Ballet Theatre and accompanying them on their Greek tour. Agnes de Mille choreographs her final piece The Other from a wheelchair and there's a hilarious scene with Jane Hermann (co-director of the company) screaming expletives down the the phone at a Metropolitan Opera House bureaucrat for programming the Kirov right after them ruining A.B.T. sales.