When Janie gets a mad on to see something, she tends to want to see it there and then. So although the movie Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love would probably be available to see somewhere long after the bank holiday weekend…
…and although it was carnival weekend and the only slot that might suit us was Sunday evening at the Curzon Victoria…
…off we went. Actually the journey wasn’t too bad.
Here’s the movie trailer:
It was a very interesting movie. Janie has long been fascinated by Leonard Cohen, his muse Marianne Ihlen and the interesting lifestyle they (and many others) had on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s.
The movie actually spans many decades, right up until the time, in 2016, when both Marianne and Leonard, coincidentally, succumbed to Leukaemia within a few months of each other.
The next day, we were invited next door to Joy’s for drinks and nibbles, where we met a nice Italian family who have just moved in to the neighbourhood. Coincidentally, the Italian gentleman was a huge fan of Leonard Cohen, although Cohen’s work is little known in Italy.
Janie and I look a little “Marianne & Leonard” in the following picture, taken that next afternoon at Joy’s…
…if you are prepared to use your imagination rather a lot.
Janie and I saw a trailer for this movie several times over “Twixtmas”, when we went to the Curzon to see several films.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) is a member of the US Supreme Court, was an iconic equal rights lawyer in the 1970s and remains a very interesting character. This is a documentary film about her.
It didn’t open until January and we didn’t get around to going to see it, but i did notice that it was available for us to watch at home on Curzon Home Cinema, which we are eligible for at a modest hire price through my membership.
Now that we have a little Tivo thingie for the Noddyland bedroom TV as well as the living room one, we decided to watch this movie through streaming at home.
We’d certainly recommend the film and also the Curzon streaming service if you are a member and your internet/cable set up is good enough to take it. We’ll be watching more Curzon films at home rather than shlepping out to documentary movies from now on, I’m sure.
This is a very interesting movie; in some ways an entertaining documentary and in other ways disturbing/thought-provoking.
It is the true story of identical siblings who were separated at birth as part of an ill-conceived scientific experiment and who become reunited in their late teens by happenstance.
While the other films we saw this season were all very interesting, both about the people involved and the issues those people encountered in their lives, Three Identical Strangers was deeper in that it made us think about a great many hugely important issues, ranging from medical ethics to the nature verses nurture debate.
The movie is extremely well made. It avoids the pitfall of trying to be too conclusive whereas, in reality, part of the fascination and tragedy of the story is that it isn’t and could never have been conclusive.
Janie and I saw the movie early evening and then spent the rest of the evening debating the issues. Highly recommended.
Janie and I had (are having) ample opportunity to play tennis over the holiday season this year. The weather is dull but basically dry and warm enough to enable us to play.
The majority of our contests have been draws. Of the eight contests we’ve had over the holiday season so far (as I write on 31 December), five have ended undecided as 5-5 draws. Until today the completed sets sat at 1-1. Today I managed to win the set, but was down in the second set when we agreed we’d had enough.
Picture from Nemu in Japan last month – imagine that racket spped
Janie is playing powerfully these days and is also mixing up her play to put me off my rhythm.
And talking of powerful women…
…our traditional Curzon film fest over Twixtmas has been a veritable powerful women fest.
Yayoi Kusama’s story really is fascinating, as is her art. The more perceptive Ogblog readers might have observed a sample of her infinity work taking over the look of Ogblog in the past week or so.
Actually we were glad to have the DVD rather than a cinema viewing of this one – as the subtitles were a bit difficult to read at times and tended to move on ridiculously quickly on some occasions, so we were grateful for the chance to scroll back and make sure we had assimilated the wise words.
Here is the official trailer for that movie:
The DVD is still available (just not from Victoria Miro) – e.g. from Amazon.
28th December we went, after work, to the Curzon Bloomsbury to see Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. Frankly, we hadn’t heard of rapper and activist Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. but thought her story and the description of the movie sounded fascinating.
Here is the official trailer for that movie:
It is a fascinating movie. Elements of the film go to the heart of debates about activism around complex causes. Other elements are almost comedic documentary, such as the apparently infamous incident where M.I.A. “gives the finger” to camera when performing for the Superbowl and kicks off a massive controversy – that bit reminded me more of Spinal Tap than Joan Baez or Pussy Riot.
Slightly strange mix of audience at the Curzon too. Mostly younger people who clearly have an affinity with M.I.A. as a contemporary singer, with a smattering of (how do I put this politely?) somewhat older-looking folk, like ourselves, who were probably there for the human rights more than the music. The fussy white-haired lady on our row of the Dochouse seemed to have come straight from “human-rights-activist central casting”.
The movie was well worth seeing.
30 December we returned to the Curzon Bloomsbury to see the movie about Hedy Lamarr.
Here is the official trailer of Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story:
I had read quite a lot about this one and it is a fascinating tale. Not only her achievements as an inventor of information & communications technology but also the way she completely changed (some would say reinvented) her life after escaping from Austria in the troubled 1930s. I had previously read about her scientific inventions but, before seeing the movie, I had no idea that she was born and raised Jewish nor that her first marriage was to an Austrian armaments manufacturer who had sold weapons to Hitler.
As with all three of these movies, I couldn’t completely buy in to the “powerful woman who have been denied their rightful credit” story. All three of these women are, unquestionably, to some extent, victims of injustice. Hedy Lamarr by all accounts should have benefited from her patent on frequency-hopping (or spread spectrum) telecommunications. But then, so should her co-inventor, George Antheil – he remains even less remembered for the invention that Hedy Lamarr. It is also a huge stretch to attribute all of the value in GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi to the technology in that patent.
In truth, all three of the powerful women in these movies have benefited from their beauty and charisma, while also being held back from some of the credit that might have accrued to their efforts had they been men or had they arrived at their achievements from more conventional routes.
But then, even Janie’s powerful tennis comes from an unusual source these days…
…anyway, my excuse is that it is difficult to concentrate on getting the ball back time and time again, when you know that the power and balance in Janie’s shots is being cultivated by such unconventional tennis preparation:
Making my head spin…
This will be my last posting for 2018 – happy new year to those Ogblog readers who follow Ogblog contemporarily.
Janie was very keen to see Walk With Me – she had heard great things about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master who is said to be the father of the modern mindfulness movement. Janie very much enjoyed some of his lectures on YouTube and thought the film would go deeper.
So much so that Janie was even prepared to schlep to the Curzon Bloomsbury on a Sunday evening, as that was the only slot that worked for us during the film’s opening weekend.
The film irritated us both for different reasons. In Janie’s case, because the film didn’t go deeper – in fact it didn’t really provide much insight into Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas at all – it just showed his Plum Village community and a tour beyond…at a snail-like pace.
Mindfulness is one of those concepts I like in theory, but in practice – and I did try a mindfulness course few years ago and did stick it out – I found mindfulness itself a bit irritating.
Add to that general irritation an infeasibly slow movie, the condescending tones of Benedict Cumberbach and a young man sitting next to me who seemed to have brought a lifetime supply of noisy nosh into the cinema with him…
…you get my point.
For me, the only interesting part of the movie was when the monks go on tour to the USA, so you see the slow-moving, mindful monks up against the no holds barred, fast pace of New York City.
Janie missed much of the USA tour part of the movie because she started nodding off at that juncture.
Disgraceful.
I had done my nodding off and missing chunks of the movie during the earlier, unbelievably slow passages.
Below is an excellent trailer that will give you a reasonable feel for the film:
It is not a movie for the faint-hearted. Janie wondered immediately after the film whether Ai Weiwei had gone too far when getting refugees to relate and revisit the horrors of their experiences. One woman starts to vomit while recalling her story, while one man, showing the record cards of his decimated family sounds traumatised almost to the point of insanity while retelling their tragedy.
But it is also a movie that looks at the movement of people in the abstract, with statements by political and civil leaders expounding many different views on the causes of and possible solutions for the migration crisis facing the world.
Ai Weiwei takes us to many of the world’s trouble spots. Janie and I have been to many such places ourselves, but have never really witnessed the more extreme causes of human migration first hand.
Janie and I visited a traditional Garo Village in Meghalaya in 2005, only to learn that the village has been razed by the electricity board and the Garo people were now living in a shanty, fearful of the wet season to come.Ai Weiwei is brilliant, in my view, by showing us the many sides to the story, from the deeply human individual cases to some beautifully shot scenes, some of people on the move, others of mundane scenes such as a gigantic pile of life jackets. Janie questioned whether Ai Weiwei’s eye for artistic images was appropriate when depicting scenes related to such suffering – so many migrants are lost at sea for want of, or despite those life jackets.
It is 140 minutes long, this film. I think it is a truly superb piece of documentary cinema. I challenge anyone to watch it and not be moved by it.
It will probably also change some aspect of your opinions on this politically and socially-charged subject. If you think there is a fundamental difference between refugees and economic migrants, for example, this film might make you start to think differently.
This film doesn’t provide answers, but it certainly informs and asks the right sort of challenging questions.
This was our first time at the Curzon Victoria – very nicely done the place is too – we’ll surely go to that one again if/when it suits.
But back to Paddington 2 – superb cast yet again, with Hugh Grant doing a brilliant job as the guest villain for this particular film.
There are bits that possibly tickle me more than most people – for example the way my Notting Hill neighbourhood is depicted – so charming & quirky…almost but of not quite as it really is. Except we do have a calypso band on almost every street corner…of course we do.
Indeed I absolutely love the way London is depicted in this film – a subtle blend of modern (e.g. The Shard) and old (steam trains, telephone kiosks, Victorian prisons…umm).
Paddington 2 really did have me and Janie laughing, crying and getting excited by the action like the pair of overgrown kids we clearly are.
If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading and start making plans to go see this film.
Reading about this Michael Haneke film in the Curzon brochure, it sounded very interesting and right up our street. Strangely, we have often noticed reviews of Haneke films and thought that they sounded like our cup of tea, but this (I think) is the first we have actually got off our butts and gone to see one.
We’ll be looking out for more Haneke films (including some of his earlier ones) after this experience. We thought this was a really superb movie.
Talk about dysfunctional families – this high-falutin’ French family really takes the biscuit. They reminded me a bit of families you sometimes find in Francois Mauriac novels – just a more modern version.
Haneke tends to work with an ensemble of favourite actors and actresses, so it won’t surprise Haneke fans to see Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, for example. A nice little cameo role for Toby Jones too.
Janie and I thought the stand-out performance was Fantine Harduin as the little girl, Eve, at the centre of the plot. Remember where you first saw her name!
Bass Viol (Viola Da Gamba) With Seven Strings, By DasBee, source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AViola_da_gamba_basso_7.jpg
So why the picture of the rare seven-string bass viol and a name check for Hille Perl, one of the leading exponents of that instrument? Well, it is only a sub-plot but a rather full-on one; it is not all that often that you’ll see the terms sexting and viola da gamba in the same sentence…or in the same subplot. That subplot put the gilt on the gingerbread for early music lovers like me and Janie.
When Tim Connell sent round a circular announcing a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden, I knew immediately that the visit would be a special treat for Janie and guessed that Linda Cook would also be very interested. I was less sure about Michael and Elisabeth; as it turned out Michael was keen.
Janie was very keen and had not yet booked in any patients for that day, so we basically decided to make it a date and took the day off.
A hot date in the Chelsea Physic Garden
There were 25 to 30 of us in the Gresham Society party, I believe. The weather was very kind to us; occasionally the clouds looked a bit iffy, but there was also some sun and certainly no rain.
The Original Sloane Ranger In His Garden
We got split into two groups; our guide was Anne, who seemed very well informed and proved to be good company.
To my mind, the best plant in the garden was Catharanthus roseus (Madagascan or Rosy periwinkle), which yields natural remedies for childhood leukaemia, increasing survival rates by orders of magnitude. Yet the most popular plant amongst our cynical, Gresham Society group seemed to be Veratrum viride (Indian Poke), which induces profuse vomiting and which some native American tribes use to choose their leader; on a “last candidate to throw up” basis. Going back to traditional, natural methods is sometimes a very good idea.
Janie asked Anne zillions of questions, many of which seemed to me to be more about the poisonous, nasty plants, rather than the medicinal, nice ones. Even more worryingly, I thought I heard Janie ask a few of times, “would you be able to taste this if you added it to food?” Perhaps I am mistaken about that. But when we visited the bookshop before leaving, Janie bought a small book on medicinal plants and a larger book on the poisonous ones. I think I’ll eat out for a while.
We enjoyed a spot of lunch/high tea at the Tangerine Dream cafe within the garden, which made for a very convivial conclusion to the outing. We always enjoy spending time with the Gresham Society crowd.
By the time Janie had concluded her book shopping, I thought we might be running a bit late for the movies, but I had sort-of forgotten that the car journey from the Chelsea Physic Garden to the Curzon Chelsea was a very short one.
So we had time to book Janie’s birthday treat (a preview of the new V&A wing) before stepping in to The Other Side Of Hope. We thought this was a great movie – very interesting, at times amusing, at times shocking. It is about a Syrian refugee who lands-up seeking asylum and then working as an illegal in Helsinki.
Janie and I were particularly keen to see the movie Letters From Baghdad – click here for IMDb listing – and were motivated to put this Thursday evening aside as there was to be a panel discussion, organised by the producers Bird’s Eye View, after the film’s showing at the Curzon Soho.
18:25 in Soho is a bit early for us mid-week and seemingly was a bit early for everyone else – while we made it on time there seemed to be no rush to start the showing on time.
The film itself was fascinating. Gertrude Bell was a most unusual woman for her era and was hugely influential in early 20th century Arabia as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and The Great War settlement came into play. The movie is basically dramatised letters and archive papers by and about Gertrude Bell.
Each panellist asked a very open question about the film’s topic and the audience were asked to comment or ask supplementary questions of the panellists. I remember very little of what was said, other than the very obvious points about the male-dominated society in which Gertrude Bell operated more or less omitting her from the historical record for decades after she died.
Still, we were pleased to have seen the fascinating film and would have wondered about the panel discussion had we not attended that night. But we won’t be rushing to panel discussions in future unless we know the panellists and/or the nature of the proposed discussion ahead of time.
Janie (no Gertrude Bell), trying to endear herself to the locals in Palmyra, 1997.
