Self-portrait as a cubist

Self-portrait as a cubist, oil on card, 14 x 11.3 cm

The second day of my week of self-portraits. I wish I had more than one mirror for variety.

I am sik.

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I am sik, ballpen on paper, 10 x 10 cm

I am sick: my death is surely imminent: my friend, astonished and deeply concerned visits me. It is a Tragic Moment in History.

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St. Elmos Fire (1985): review: 6.5/10

"The passion burns deep"

Film depicting the transitions made by members of a group of young adults following college as they attempt to settle into their careers and consolidate their romantic lives.

The film features an appalling display of 80s styles, with the women especially ill served  by mullet hair dos and Lady Di blouses. What were they thinking?!

It is mainly entertaining, it's complex plot is very skillfully directed and it probably smuggles in some good sense about relationships, maturity, and care primarily through the aegis of the dowdy, good hearted virgin, Wendy Beamish. But the film is perhaps too squeakilly, preppishly eighties American  to succeed fully today.

Don't Look Now (1973): review: 10/10

Following the death of a child, a couple go to Venice, where they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom has mystical powers.

The film is an exploration of grief, love, and  the need to believe, or the possibility of believing in the supernatiural.

So well filmed and acted is the piece that we viewers become partners in this exploration. This identification is largely thanks to Julie Christie's excellence, which succeeds in eliciting compassion.

The Open Road (2009): review: 4/10

A baseball player's mother is ill. At her insistance, he goes to find his father- a famous baseball player, drunk and egotist- to bring him to her, taking along an ex-girlfriend for company.

This is a road movie with some beautful scenery, concerning the triangulated relationship of the three. It is well-acted, but laboured and overlong, with Jeff Bridges in particular overplaying his hand.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009): review: 2/10

A journalist decides to pursue a District Attorney, whom he believes has been falsifying evidence to win convictions. He has a personality-free girlfriend whose happens to work for the DA too.

A film that plods helplessly along, failing to entrance at all, featuring implausable characters and zero wit.

It is also lacking in atmosphere and has an annoying glossiness about it.

Solitary Man (2009): review: 5.5/10

An aging lothario and disgraced car dealer visits a university campus with his girlfriends daughter, with whom he has sex, something which causes him no end of bother.

Michael Douglas plays the usual, as do Danny deVito and Susan Sarandon in a piece that, while entirely watchable, does little to suprise.

The reason for this might lie with the moralistic intent of the makers. We are supposed to tut tut, I think, at Douglas's character all the way through: the true dreadfulness of pursuing skirt and all its destructiveness apparantly revealed. But since nothing Douglas does in the movie is really bad, this attitude serves merely to dampen the viewers' delight in seeing a shark gobble its fish.