Comfort and Joy, 1984 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
Kind of daft film that somehow I’d never seen.
Set at Christmas, as I should have realised from the title, But not a Christmas film. Great opening scene with the shoplifting, And then the bizarre next scene, where she’s leaving him, but hasn’t got round to telling him yet.
Then the actual plot gets going and runs on down to quite a flat ending. Makes me wonder if all the ice-cream stufff was his delusion caused by grief at his beloved leaving.
When you end the week with a massive merge to master, and then go downstairs to drink wine and listen to Ziggy Stardust. Hello.
A rare trip into the office today. We have the Christmas do for London-based developers and testers tonight. A little late. But that’s the way these things go sometimes.
London commuters have largely forgotten Covid ever happened, it seems.
Our Man Flint, 1966 - ★★½
I remember seeing this as a kid and absolutely loving it. We talked about it at school, probably played at being Flint.
It’s a Bond spoof. James Coburn as Flint is a super agent who is brought out of retirement to save the world from some mad scientists who are controlling the weather.
I only remembered two things about it. His ability to stop his heart for maximum rest, and the device in his watch that got him started again; and his lighter, with ‘82 functions… 83 if you want to light a cigar.’
It’s daft nonsense, but fun in places. There’s even a lesser agent called 0008 (Triple Oh Eight) who tells him ‘It’s bigger than SPECTRE.)
Watched on Saturday February 4, 2023.
Tár, 2022 - ★★★★
Tár is a much-discussed, disputed, disagreed-upon tour de force. Not since Moonlight have I read so much about a film after seeing it.
Lydia Tár is a conductor who is rehearsing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for what should be the pinnacle of her career, a live recording of Mahler's Symphony No 5. But she has a past, and it's coming to get her.
Perhaps my favourite interpretation is the too-long-titled 'Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?', from Slate. It posits that the last third or so is, essentially, fantasy, hallucination, or similar.
There's a lot to get out of this — not least encouraging me to listen to Mahler's Fifth — and I'm looking forward to watching it again.
Currently reading: Poems by Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod 📚
Us old types are told that youngsters don’t like punctuation. Full stops in texts sound angry, etc. But I find an unpunctuated message incomplete. You’re left hanging, waiting for the rest. I just got a message at work that said:
Great
Great what? Balls of fire?
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (Books 2023, 3) 📚
Fantastic graphic novel about the inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines and the first programmer.
Together they fight crime.
Well, not quite. But they do meet Wellington, Brunel, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot), and other famous Victorians, and have adventures.
A fabulous romp.
Bomber Jackson Does Some by Bob Boyton (Books 2023, 2) 📚
First, cards on the table, Bob is a friend of mine. Bomber Jackson Does Some is his first novel, self-published in 2012. He gave us a copy back then, and it’s taken me till now to read it.
Just because of the size of my to-read piles, not any quality concerns.
Bomber is an ex-boxer and an alcoholic. At the start of the novel he has just got out of prison. As you might imagine from such a setup, things largely go downhill from there. His thoughts include a fair amount of slang, some of which I didn’t understand, but the meaning was usually clear from context. For example, he refers to two homeless men as ‘real old-fashioned paraffins’. Paraffin lamp = tramp, I assume.
It’s written in first person, present tense, which I think is quite a hard voice to sustain. Bob does a good job of getting us inside Bomber’s head, and the story flows along at fine old rate.
All in all, top stuff. Recommended if you can get hold of a copy.