Ready to go!

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Some essentials: carriers for pictures, a tube with brushes, a box of paints, card supports, some clothes and the camera battery re-charger.

Well, I'm off to the UK tomorrow so I'll be posting much less regularly for a few weeks. I'll be in London and in different parts of Scotland- touching base, revisiting places I know and discovering new ones.

 If the weather is nice then it should be a productive painting trip.

Love and Other Disasters (2006): review: 6.5/10

Led by a girl who works at Vogue, a crew of homosexuals and girly girls cavort in London in search of romantic bliss: Murphy wanders about prettily, sharing a flat with one of the homosexuals and dispensing advice. She has an ex-boyfriend: he is described unflatteringly: they occasionally meet for sexual congress. She likes an Argentinian photographic assistant who provides an anchor of seriousness among the trivia, flirtation and occasional humour provided by, among others, alcoholic woman- the British consider drunkeness to be essentially a comic -as opposted to pathetic- condition.

This is a slick bourgois romantic comedy which still has life despite, post crisis, feeling like a period piece: how much you like this film will depend on how much you like the environment and culture it depicts.

The Terminal (2004): review: 3/10

A man is stranded in a beaurocratic twilight zone when his fictitious East-European country has a revolution, and his passport is no longer accepted by the US. He lives in the airport which he is forbidden to leave. He has an ongoing conflict with the head of immigration at the airport, whose ends seem unclear.  He manages to find ways of earning money, make friends and begin a romantic liason with a women which lacks any discernable fizzle.

The film does not emphasis the inherant tragedy in the beaurocratic situation, it's strangeness and awfullness: it is too light. Hanks is as irritating as ever: with that ghastly, saggy mouth and piggy eyes and oily skin, and his horrible "folksy-method" acting style.

The joke is often the ridiculousness of foreigners, most notable the Indian floor-cleaner. Hanks is given a stupid accent and a silly walk There no parallel joke about the ridiculousness of Americans.

The film is considerably overlong and unpleasantly ingratiating.

Raising Helen (2004): review: 6/10

There are three sisters: Helen lives in New York and works for a fashion model agency: she is single and works a fair amount, at other times drinking. Her elder sister, who is considerably less attractive, has two children, a settled suburban lifestyle and a superiority complex. The third sister and husband die in a car accident: it is written in the Will that Helen is to take charge of the children, a boy and an adolescent girl, much to the chagrin of the elder sister and to the suprise of Helen herself.

Helen moves from Manhattan to Queens where she is befriended by a kind neighbour. She sends the children to a Lutheran school, where she meets a charming pastor. She has problems keeping up with her work commitments, and fulfilling some of the roles of parent, specifically when the adolescent girl becomes involved with an unpleasant young man who wears a baseball cap the wrong way round.

There's nothing really wrong with this film: it's ok, overlong, well intentioned, but unsurprising.

Little Black Book: review: 2/10

A girl works for a television company which produces Oprah-style confessional discussions, in which people complain about their partners, whom they meet in front of live televised studio audeinces. She starts to do research on her own partner, going through his posessions and interviewing and befriending his ex-girlfriends.

This film goes on and on: it is quite unclear what the message is: it lacks the clarity and simplicity of "Pandora's Box". The acting is very two-dimensional. It thinks it is funny when it isn't and it has an awful, lifeless slickness about it too.

The Break-up Artist (2009): review: 3/10

A girl runs an agency which helps young couples seperate. It suffers from competition from a rival agency and, losing clients, the heroine accepts a commission to re-connect a man with his ex. The man is an art teacher and is quite sensitive.

All this is narrated by a girl with one of those very squeaky nasal American accents.


Slick, somewhat charmless film, lacking the freshness of real life about it, and featuring many smug women: however I found it just about watchable.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994): review: 7/10

Road movie in which three transvestite performers drive from Sydney to Alice Springs, to perform at a hotel there.

The elder of the trio has had a sex change- operation, the next has a child and wife with whom he meets for the first time, the younger is of little real interest. At one point their bus breaks down: the elder begins an unlikely relationship with their car machanic whose Thai wife, famed in the community for shooting ping pong balls from her vagina has left him.

The film contains many one-liners- these are rarely funny. The film's principle energies come from the contrast between generally unsophisticated mining communities and the performers. The male dominated bars are essentiallly chauvenistic institutions, and predicatably, their cleintele are provoked by the performers. In the film, transvestitism is a creative liberation from the limitations of  masculinity: both the rough masculinity of the miners, and the middle class suburban masculinity of the suburbs- as depicted in flashbacks. The characterisation is not very deep, but it is deep enough to sustain the film.

The Australian landscapes are thrilling.