Highway overpass

Highway overpass, oil on card, 11.2 x 9.7 cm - available

Another painting of the highway, which is probably the finest modern construction here on the island- though given the level of design here that is hardly a great accolade.

I am looking forward to buying a car in August and exploring more thoroughly the inter-urban landscape.

Across the lake from the dunes

*

Across the lake from the dunes, oil on card, 10 x 13.2 cm - available

Painted very quickly in Lagoa: there is a play off between speed and accuracy, freshness and finish. Work too fast and you lose finish and accuracy; work too slow and the picture becomes tired.

I'm going to work on some fast pieces, each to take a maximum of twenty minutes. I'll keep the best only. This might be the ideal wat to work in the UK where the weather changes so often.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009): review: 1/10

In New York, a journalist finds great delight in shopping and as a result has a great many credit card debts: she therefore attends a shopaholics anonymous group. Ironically, she is hired to write for a financial magazine: she forms a romantic attachment to her editor.

Inept, graceless romcom with little to reccomend it: the plot rambles hopelessly, and the "comic" scenes have something horribly forced about them. Worse, the central romantic couple make an absurd combination, having zero sexual frisson.

The subsidiary characters seem pointless. The starring actress is two-dimensional: one can feel no pleasure in getting to know her through the film.

Heartbreakers (2001): review: 1/10

A mother-daughter team find rich men to marry and then divorce, thus makng a good living.

A real stinker of a film featuring:

1. a charmless performance from Weaver, who adopts a very unfunny Russian accent for much of the film.

2. a dull and obvious performance from Hackman

3. lifeless dialogue

4. very unattractive characters

5. a meandering plotline whcih completely fails to intreague, having a "make it up as we go along" quality.

It is also considerably overlong, and invites very unflattering comparasions with "Some Like it Hot".

True Grit (2010): review: 7/10

*

A headstrong girl, having recently lost her father to a thief, hires a marshal to bring him to justice. A second marshal joins them, forming a party spanning three generations They proceed into Indian country to pursue the villain.

Overlong, but with some interesting intergenerational conflicts. As so often, Jeff Bridges overplays his hand.

The Coen's seem to have an ability to make films which mesmerise, usually because of their beauty, but which fade from memory very soon after being watched. 

True Grit contains  considerable violence and cruelty: hangings, shootings, stabbings, a man has a finger cut off. These have a revoting sadistic quality.

Cherry Blossoms (2008): review: 9.5/10

An elderly German couple travel to visit their children, from whom they have grown distant.

The  film starts off satirically, with scenes illustrating quite starkly the generational gap, and the resentments of their children who respond gracelessly to their parents' presence. It also wittily illustrates the barreness of the husband's life attitudes.

From this point, the film takes a surprising turn, taking us to Japan.

It is impossible for me to describe much more without spoiling enjoyment of the film: let me conclude simply that the director and actors succeed in transforming the tone of the film from a social satire into something altogether more sophisticated: a meditation on grief and death and Japan.

A Perfect World (1993): review: 9/10

Two prisoners escape in Texas, one is much nastier than the other. They kidnap a fatherless boy.

This is a melancholy film notable for combination of two plot elements: the first is the close and sometimes charming realationship that develops between escaped convict and a kidnapped boy which describes tenderly the importance of fathers for boys (especially those, it would appear, forced to suffer the restrictions of a Joehovah's Witness mother).

The second plot element traces the attitudes of macho policemen: these attitudes are set in relief by the presence of Laura Dern as an official seconded to join the all male team by the mayor's office: she is treated unpleasantly by her surly male peers, whose instincts for violent solutions lead to the unnecessary death of their quarry.

Costner is very good: the boy is supurb, as is Dern; Eastwood more formulaic.