Nina Gordon

Nina Gordon

You need to hear the accoustic version of 'Straight outta Compton'. NWA played on the guitar and sung with a lovely voice. It rocks.

Takeshi Miike

I watched The Happiness of the Katakuris on Friday evening and it was fantastic. A Japanese musical comedy about a family in a remote guest house who keep seeing their guests die under bizarre circumstances and bury the bodies in the woods to avoid bad publicity. There are lots of musical numbers including a fabulous karaoke number complete with soft focus, mirror balls and the lyrics at the bottom of the screen. There is another songs with the dead guests acting as a chorus, a conman who claims to be the nephew of the Queen of England and claymation demons.

Oh, and a volcano erupts at one point too.

It really is quite unlike anything I have ever seen before but is really rather wonderful and not what you would really expect from Takeshi Miike.



I've been a fan of his for a while and he is actually a very versatile director so a musical should not be a surprise. However his other films do tend to be darker and certainly much more violent.




Ichi the Killer would be the one that people will remember for the violence and at first glance it really is very far removed from the world of the Katakuris

Somebody is suspended from fishhooks and has boiling oil poured over him, the title character has shoes with blades in them and cuts people in half with high kicks, another character cuts out his own tongue to apologise for a failure to his boss. And yet the violence is cartoonish and the film is a very dark comedy. And the ending. Well, he has a way of pulling these truly bizarre endings right out of left field. They may not always make sense but you do realize that you are watching something quite special where just about anything is possible.



Another good example of his odd endings is at the climax of the first Dead or Alive film. What started as a Yakuza thriller suddenly turns into something completely different in the last couple of minutes. That film also has one of the best starts to a film ever. The story goes that the script had about 40 minutes of setting up the characters and their world. Miike decided that this was too long and so gives the whole 40 minutes in a blinding ten minutes of quick cuts, extreme sex, violence and noodle eating set to a fantastic rock track (which I am still trying to track down somehow). It's a truly outrageous piece of film making and it works so well. The other two films in the series have the same actors but they swap roles, the tones are very different and as good as they are (and they are very good indeed) they never quite reach the heights of those first ten minutes). I think they would probably be the best films for a novice to start to get to know Miike.

Of course his nest known film is probably Audition but I refuse to watch it due to my needle phobia as apparantly the last half hour does feature quite a lot of needle and piano wire based mayhem.

So there you go. Here ends today's lesson in odd Japanese cinema.

I bought my tickets to the film festival earlier in the week... Looks like I'm going to see 37 films in the space of 14 days... I can't wait!

Well, that was a long weekend!

Martin arrived on Wednesday evening and we went pretty much straight to the pub where we met up with Joost and his girlfriend (who's name escapes me at the moment). Thursday was more beers with some guys from work, including two people who were over from the New York office to see me and the team for the week. Friday, Jen (Martin's wife) arrived in the morning, and they went off for a meal with some old colleagues of hers. I went to the station to pick up Laura who came up from Lux for the evening. Went to the Bastoche and met up with the boys. Several beers there and then next door to the Villon for food, accompanied by several bottles of wine. A couple of the strongest Irish Coffees I have had for a while and then a round of Limonchello, a few more beers in the Corto and then we grabbed a taxi to go the Wild Geese to meet Martin and Jen. Walked in to find most of the department there, I'd forgotten that they were having drinks that evening. Finally staggered home at just before 4am... A really great night, it was really, really good to see everybody.

The rest of the weekend involved lots of eating and another superb meal at l'Herbe Rouge, a Japanese restaurant by the Sablon. Fantastic food but not cheap...

Just watched a low budget German film called 'Tears of Kali', it's not too bad, three stories revolving around a cult based in India that may have gone too far!!!! in their quests to find themselves (the italics are supposed to be ironic). It does however feature a woman cutting off her own eyelids with a pair of nail scissors in the first five minutes and then half way through a man removing his own skin with a box-cutter.

Happy Valentine's day!

Music

If anybody is interested, I've added a link to my LastFM account over on the left there *points* if you want to see what I'm listening to.

It's a great service if you are not already using it.

Things to watch

Earlier in the week I watched Wolf Creek which is fantastic. Almost the first hour is just character development and you come to like the people involved. Once the shit hits the fan, and it does for the last half hour, it may not be graphic, but holy crap it hurts. I was starting to get quite stressed towards the end!

Somebody at work lent me the first series of The West Wing which is one of those things I'd been meaning to watch for ages. I popped on the first episode this evening and ended up watching the first four episodes. It's amazing. Brilliantly written, acted and filmed.

I think I'll go and see Munich tomorrow, I keep hearing good things about it.

But enough for now, I'm off to bed, g'night internet.

Drinking in the UK

Was in the UK last weekend to go for drinks with various internet people. Saturday was in London, in a bar in Soho called The Edurance that was absolutely packed. It was also full of pretentious and annoying media types. God I hate them. I got offered free coke by sole complete stranger in the toilets at about 7 in the evening. Of course mate, I'll accept illegal drugs from a complete stranger at no cost. Nothing dodgy about that at all... It was an OK night but not great.

Spent the night in the Regent Palace Hotel which is literally just off Piccadilly Circus. Quite handy ad dirt cheap at 35 pounds. But it was with a shared bathroom that only had a cold shower... I was up at 6.30 am and went for a walk to try and find a newsagents. Central London is quite odd at that time on a Saturday morning. Shame I forgot to take my camera from the hotel room. Walking through Soho may not have been the best idea though, for some reason it was full of groups of large black men who kept offering me drugs. Do I look like a druggy or something?

The took the coach to Oxford and had a splendid time with a bunch of loons.

For example, this is a bunch of the blokes having a 'discreet' conversation about the woman in the white top on the right who was showing a tremendous amount of cleavage.

She noticed eventually.

It was nice to see everybody again, saw Mike and his lovely girlfriend Jade, Lewis, Ross, Tara and here internet superstar boyfriend Dave who is responsible for the wonderfulness of the pixelmash version of Star Wars amongst other things. A lovely bunch of people and the bar was serving double gin and tonic for 2 pounds 15 pence. I may have had a couple.

Of course I woke up really early on Sunday but this leant that I had a nice long walk through Oxford which is a lovely place. I took some photos:





The rest of them can be seen on my Flickr account.

Another week over

So, another one ends, and I'm exhausted again. On Thursday night I was asleep by 21.30 and slept through to 7.00 but was knackered again in the afternoon. I've bought some vitamins today as I thing I'm getting a bit run down. I just need to remember to take them everyday!

Had a nice evening last night, Jean-Paul couldn't make it out, so Pierre and I went for a meal down on the Avenue Louise: foie gras, shrimps and salmon with some rather nice wine. After that we had the urge for a cigar so wandered down the road to the Havana Corner but they had a private party in the cigar bar, tired the Chelsea but they now only allow smoking in the back room on Saturdays. Ended up in a rather nice place a bit further up the Chausee de Charleroi and had a nice Cuban and some very nice 25 year old Armagnac. In addition there was a very attractive young lady sitting at the table next to us, so it was a very pleasant evening all round.

I really need to tidy up a bit tomorrow as I've got Martin arriving on Wednesday, Jen, his wife, on Friday and I think Laura is still planning on coming up on Friday too. It's going to be a packed week in the apartment, on the social scene and at work as there are two people from the New York office over all week and I need to look after them.

Must remember to take the vitamins.

Tired

So tired... Was in London on Friday then Oxford on Saturday for lots and lots of gin. Was just getting of the Eurostar on Sunday evening when Douglas texted me to say he'd be in Brussels on Monday evening. We met up for a couple of beers are talked crap until far later than I was expecting to stay out.

I'm now knackered but will do a proper update soon, I promise.

Well, I'm back!

Trip went well, it was a bit of a surprise to arrive at Frankfurt to see snow on the ground and then when approaching Brussels the pilot announced 'the weather is lovely and it's -4 degrees'. I was getting used to the warm weather!

Had a busy week at work but it's over now, I'm off to the UK tomorrow to meet some internet weirdos for drinks in London and then off to Oxford on Saturday for more of the same. I'm looking forward to it, will be nice to see some of the guys again and it's probably the last time before I leave.

Watched 'The Nameless' this evening which is very good and creepy as hell. Fantastic ending too.

Then watched 'Altered States' again. Another great film. Lots of psychadelic religious imagery, all very Jungian with the idea of a shared soul, archetypes and all that. It's a subject that fascinates me, so I always enjoy that film, even if it is not without it's flaws. For instance the 'love conquers all' ending does not really fit with the tone of the rest of the film. But it still contains some fascinating ideas. For instance, if there is such a thing as a collective unconscious, a shared human memory that can be tapped into using either ritual or psychadelics, it would be possible to go back to the start, beyond the birth of man and back to the start of everything. Could that be what some people call god? Merely the collective memory of billions of years of evolution that is stored in out genes? Why not? There are certainly crazier ideas out there. The idea of a shared memory is certainly one that would help explain the commonalities of myths and beliefs from around the world. But then again what is it that makes us human? IS there such a thing as soul or is it just random noise created by sub atomic particles winking in and out of existence at a quantum level? I'm rambling and not making much sense. Time for bed I think!