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FILM You, the Living (Roy Andersson), 15.

Remarkable and painterly and straight out of Stockholm, this stylised and superbly set sequence of loosely connected scenes can barely claim the title of film with narrative and yet the wanderings of its oppressed and northen light dwelling dominions stalks a life of harsh pleasures eeked out under gloomy skies. vignettes are barely held one to teh next with the occasional appearence of

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FILM: In Bruges (18)

and odd creature this: two irish hitmen are instructed to hole up in the titular belgian town, to await further instructions. the younger, colin farrell fresh from a marathon viewing of father ted, loathes bruges. in fact his loathing turns as we come to understand around a botched hit: the slaying of a priest also claimed a child and colin’s charged performance attests to a man for whom homicide is a payday but upon which sits a code of honour and right deed. the disgust at bruges’s charms is an expression of his torment and soon the flemish masters accounts of the abyss they view on slack slow days, fashion meaning for his pain. his companion (brendan gleeson) is at turns irascible and then aggrieved as the order come from the unseen uber-cockney villain harry, to slay farrrell, to clean up loose ends and restore some sense of right. so it all sounds dreadfully anguished but this movie is played for laughs, mainly through the angst of our col’s staggering forward, impelled towards some sense of calamity. directly quoting roegs masterpiece ‘dont look now’ the characters move through the dim watery of bruges, deadpanning their mordant lines. violence and dark misgivings abound in equal measure and when gleeson fails to kill his chum the ferocious ralph fiennes’ gang boss appears to lay the matter to rest; its all a question of hard man geezer honour. perhaps im being hard on in bruges, its nicely shot and conjures fine performances all round but its trying too hard to stuff a quart into a pint pot. there was a distinct feeling of a script overly burdened by its pretensions and whilst the comparison between the tragedy of ‘dont look now’ and ‘in bruges’ is almost a pleasing one, it is the gap twixt visualisation and realisation into which my viewing pleasure fell. a good film besmirched by its own aspirations. still, worth seeing and considerably better than most hollywood fare.

FILM: 10000BC (Roland Emmerich) - 12a

oh why oh why oh why do i do this to myself? way off of my demographic, the ineffable and the existential this does not promise. instead an excruciating saunter through the hollywood quest movie as sketched out in that joseph campbell weekender the director attended back when we was a nipper. bedreadlocked youth in search of lost father, the girl, dignity, the tired old verities… this CGI by numbers behemoth disregards all claims for originality and instead artlessly guides you from one recent blockbuster to the next. leaning desperately on deranged mel’s startling and at times remarkable apocalypto, 10000BC failed to deliver furry bikinis and instead played dot to dot along this way: LOTR; Jurassic Park; Emmerlichs 2nd viewing yawn The Day After Tomorrow; that film with him out of Crying Game that became a tedious sci-fantasy teatime for a few seasons. I throughly recommend an evening at home putting yr books in alphabetical order rather than witness this soulless piece of industrial film-making. execrable.

say something nice: nice colour outfits on the priesthood.

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (12a) - Julian Schnabel

and the overheated cinema… this was shaping up to the be the best film of the year. left ‘locked in’ after a major stroke, this cinematic adaptation by plate gluing uber-dollar artist and renaissance man Schnabel, of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s remarkable account of his life in his figurative diving bell, Le Scaphanre et le papillon, from the off.  This movie hits the tear gas whilst asking us to connect with the life of the inert Bauby unable to move anything but his left eye.  From this position of terrifying prison Bauby dictated the source novel

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Arsenal 2 Blackburn 0

well im not accustomd to premiership football so the 60k who sauntered into the 400 or five or six million quid stadium that is The Emirates, and theres me not understanding football at all and thinking The Emirates was an airline or a place to smoke tabs en route to Sri Lanka or go doggy style crazy over duty free ‘cause the holiday wasnt that eventful and theres not much difference between the tan i had from the salon and how i look now, so buying stuff at 3.5 per cent below Uk market rent is special, well all that, The emirates is special

 Actually my smug educated self aside it was pretty special. You get through the turnstile and contemplate dropping thrre and a half quid on plastic lager but the game has JUST started and whilst my benefactor queued to find out where are illicitly acquired RFID tagged cards entile us to sit (20 rows back behind the 2nd half away goal- nice), im off in child like mode peeringthrough the small doorway into THE GROUND.  this is special.

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