Displaced

2009 November 24
by tim

So if I press this button, does it really copy everything over to Posterous?

These Gauls are crazy

2009 September 4
by tim

Edinburgh Fringe 2009: So many artists, so much talent, so little sunshine.

Zic Zazou in full...whatever that is

I have no idea how exactly you tune two saucepans so that hitting things with them sounds a perfect fifth, but that’s why I was in the audience and these guys were on the stage.

They are Zic Zazou, and they kept this up for a full hour.

I want them at every kids birthday party I ever organize. And I suddenly want to watch Delicatessen again.

 

Happy Bleriot Day

2009 July 25
by tim

In 1909 he completed the first flight across a large body of water in a heavier-than-air craft when he crossed the English Channel, receiving a prize of 1000 British pounds for doing so.

The prize for this feat of progressive engineering and Anglo-French bridge-building came from the Daily Mail, which is the kind of irony that can make a historian’s day.

Robert Delaunay, Homage to Blériot from 1914:

homage_to_bleriot

Heroes of old, men of renown

2009 July 20
by tim

James Burke, Cliff Michelmoore, Patrick Moore

They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Happy 40th, Apollo.

 

These words lie inside, they hurt me so

2009 July 5
by tim

karaoke confessional

Edinburgh Film Festival wrap-up is online over yonder: Antichrist and Antipasto.

Edinburgh footnotes: Last year I saw  The Fall and when I came out it felt like Earth’s magnetism had reversed while I was in there – I may have mentioned this before. This year people emerged from Antichrist on their hands and knees looking for someone to surrender to. Different year, different world.

I have seen detective films hinge on sex, drugs, science, sorcery and every type of unseen glowing whatsit in a suitcase. Until The Missing Person, I had never seen one hinge on the power of art to heal America after 9/11. So a marketing challenge there. If “Awesome use of that Edward Hopper painting” is of any use on the poster, then you’re welcome.

The Hurt Locker is not for everyone, but made me yelp like a small child on occasion and I’m taking that as a good thing. Kathryn Bigelow is still the best antidote available to stupidity in action films; so no more duff Lamborghini commercials now, please.

I yelped  during the wonderful Modern Love Is Automatic too. I did it quietly every time its deadpan nurse-dominatrix threw a look of withering disdain at the world in general, which was about half the movie, and did it again whenever she switched to bottomless apathy, which was the other half. I laughed out loud when the festival programmer called it ‘pure punk’, which made me think one of us had been hitting the whisky a bit early and watched the wrong film. But in the end I had to stop: Melodie Sisk’s four-minute voice-cracking bittersweet karaoke at the end was just too much. If she doesn’t get you deep in the chest then you’re made of stone. Or disdainfully apathetic, which works here too.

 

The Divine Miss M

2009 June 27
by tim

dressed to kill

Discussion of films at the Edinburgh Film Festival is starting to turn up at my usual sluggish pace over at Critic’s Notebook. A discussion of the sweet tingly feeling caused by Melodie Sisk in Modern Love Is Automatic will probably be involved.

 

In which I am completely wrong

2009 June 12
by tim

Now you’re talking

2009 May 25
by tim

Runs with scissors

2009 May 25
by tim

surely she's not going to...oh she has The condensed Cannes:

Inglourious Basterds:  Diverting.

Bright Star:  Emotional.

Taking Woodstock:  Flat.

Antichrist:  Holy hell on a stick surely not with the drill but that’s sweet jesus don’t do that and the busted leg with the talking fox and the deer’s afterbirth and I think the person next to me has been ill and christ alive Charlotte surely you’re not going to cut that off help I feel faint.

Pretty much everything else that happened to me at Cannes 2009:  Merde.

 

l’affiche

2009 April 26
by tim

cannes09

I’ll send postcards.

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