The last day of March 2011 has been an excellent work day in that I worked for six hours on the Liturgy of artmanjospehgrech completed a redraft of the first thirty pages with four to six more pages to do I am going slowly starting with the first line and rewriting as ideas occur with each new consideration. I then worked on a new writing covering the Sopranos which involves and second look and then the Boardwalk Empire. I also watched Blue Bloods which disappointed I sorted out completed work in the first floor store and then partially completed work in the first floor work room. The motivation for this was a final search for my Oyster card and after searching everywhere possible and not finding it I eventually managed to log on the site having to be reminded of he sign on name and then get a new password link After all that I discovered I only had £3.50 on the account although a new card requires £5 deposit. Unfortunately the replacement is unlikely to arrive before I set off for the Midland’s and London although at present this is primarily a family visit including one or two visits to cemeteries on the agenda.
Today I begin with the first of retrospective film notes and the first 8 Women which I saw at the Bolden Cineworld on 27th December 2002. Because the experience was nine years ago I am not attempting to recount the story but give my memories or memory if I have them. The first is that there were some young people in the 20.20 evening performance who did not appreciate that the film was in French with English subtitles and created a disturbance before walking out. After this incident the staffs were at pains to advise customers when other subtitled films were shown. The film was a curious concoction more an Agatha Christie who did it, than comedy with some singing added. I remember some great visuals and although the 8 women were reported well known I only knew of Catherine Deneurve and Danielle Darrieux then and still.
My only other note is that I saw the film over a New Year between visiting by birth mother and my care mother whose health had deteriorated as a consequence of the incompetence of her General Practitioner and a Health Visitor. The GP subsequently apologised but the Health Visitor lied, a strong charge but one which can be proved. Within three months my birth mother had died in hospital where she had not wanted to be admitted and a result of several levels of failure and incompetence. I spent years going through the changing complaints procedures being mislead by various levels of officialdom. I hope to one day become sufficiently emotionally detached to write up this aspect of the tragedy in some detail.
The second film also has 8 and women in the Title but with the addition of a half- 8 ½ women, neither film to be confused with 8 which covers 8 short films or 8 ½ the Fellini film which I reviewed recently along with the musical version called 9. Having said this, 8 ½ women is an English language homage to 8 ½ in so far as a father and his son use their wealth to establish their personal harem to bring women on contracts to live as their concubine.
I did not immediately remember anything about the Peter Greenaway directed and written film which I saw at the Newcastle Film Theatre 10 January 2000, over a decade ago. As soon as I read the story notes I remembered several visual images and that the women were carefully selected for their different specialities. The other aspect which I do remember is that the film was more of a verbal exercise and that despite the subject there was no portray sexual activity as has become the custom.
The available notes remind that among the collection interesting and challenging females is someone who yearns to be a nun, a girl who loves horses and sleeps with a pig, a Norwegian bank clerk, a female impersonator who is female, a compulsive Japanese slot machine player, someone who wants to be made pregnant so she can sell the babies, a woman selling her body and a woman in a wheel chair who accounted for the half plus one other. I remember the film as fun and of no consequence.
The third and final film of this first film memory note is Thirteen Days which covered the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came closest to Nuclear World War. 13 days which has the same title as the book by Robert Kennedy was based on another book called The Kennedy Tapes inside the White House and also included more recent material then declassified. I saw the film at the Bolden Cineworld on 21st March 2001. The Missile Crisis has been covered by several books, films and documentaries. The USA government discovered Missile sites on Cuba with preparation of new sites and instituted a naval blockade to prevent the arrival of further Missiles and supplies from Russia in October 1962. The USA had before this deployed a similar range of intercontinental and medium range missiles aimed at Russia in Turkey and Italy. There was an exchange of threats and secret agreement negotiated through the UN General Secretary which led to the sites being removes as were the 1961 USA sites in Turkey and Europe., Reading notes on the actual event I query with myself if I knew before that unknown to the President the military had moved the state of readiness to Defcon 2, with Defcon 3 the state of alter reserved for War and initiated a trial of an offensive rocket, again without the approval or knowledge of he President. The film starred Kevin Costner in a role which has no basis on reality. I have no memory of the film visual or otherwise.
The latest episode of Blue Bloods was predictable and disappointing. The theme was the limitations of the rule of law and justice systems which in addition to the presumption of innocence with out proof of guilt, requires the highest standard tests of proof and with it the danger that guilty persons will not be convicted because of technical mistakes. In this instance, a vicious serial rapist is released and being the USA is greeted with acclaim by individuals who are attracted to such characters.
The evidence is that the man will attempt to kill a most recent victim who barely escaped with her life and has not been willing to testify in open court. It was quickly evident that the man had set his sights not just on eliminating the witness but the daughter of the police chief Assistant DA. My suspicion that he had sights on the daughter was quickly confirmed when on providing round the clock protection for the potential witness they captured a disguised look alike fan while the serial rapist murderer attends to his preferred target. When the daughter decides to work late at the office dismissing the plea from one of brothers to be careful and father arranges to join her for a meal opposite the building and then proceeds when she does not arrive without first going over to the building to check you know what is going happen.
Fortunately when the son phones father to express his concern father goes over to investigate and shoots the man as he holds the daughter hostage. At least we were saved the round the table meal at the end of the episode although this take place earlier with the usual homilies.
I also like the sound of a new Sky 1 series called Runaway which was advertised as crime in 60’s Soho. As someone who spent many nights in Soho Jazz clubs, its pubs, and hot sandwich bars, among the ladies of the night, I never encountered violence or sight of criminal goings on. The programme followed familiar tracks with a prostitute mother, pimp father, boxing ambitions for the son, and a difficult life for the daughter. I never worked out the Soho link.
I have watched one new film on the Sky Anytime TV module. From Paris with Love staring a difficult to recognise John Travolta and a Johnny Depp look alike Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Myers plays an assistant to the USA Ambassador in Paris who has willingly been recruited to undertake non combative intelligence gathering which includes planting a bug in the office of someone visited by the Ambassador. He also plays chess with the Ambassador thus indicating his intellectual thinking ahead and food memory skills. After expressing an interesting in having a more active roll he is asked to help out a special operative (John Travolta) because of an immediate lack of anyone else available. This is one of several nonsense aspects of the story but without which there would be no story.
His first task is to get Travolta away from customs because he had kicked up a fuss about not being able to bring cans of beer into France. Meyers slaps a diplomatic bad on the cans which in fact contain Travolta’s favourite weapon. Given that he has volunteered Meyers is unbelievably naive about what his role is likely to involve and the first half of the film comprises Travolta shooting and killing half a dozen employees of a Chinese restaurant where a vast quantity of cocaine is stored between ceiling of the ground floor and first floor which rains down when Travolta knowingly shoots holes all over, asking Meyers to collect a substantial amount in a large Chinese vase.
He first explains that the daughter of the senior Government official has got involved in drugs and they are on a revenge mission to shut the supply line down. He lets one employ live with a message as the basis of getting to the power boss, who we find being entertained by a group Chinese children. Before entering the premises he singled handed deals with half a dozen street yobs and then with the security guards for Mr Big. From Mr Big he wants the name of his supplier and at this point the trail take then to a middle East North Africa source during which experience Meyers loses and regains an antique ring given him by his girlfriend and is required to make his first kill.
They then find the bomb making centre after Travolta reveals the problem is a terrorist plot and not the drugs and when it looks three are escaping they find a way to blow them up before they can and they find a way of blowing up Meyer‘s car as they leave the area in a stolen police car. Travolta is not convinced they have aborted the plot, especially when he sees photos of Meyer on the wall of the bomb making factory.
From the outset Meyer has balanced his official and extra curricular working life with an intense love affair with a fabric designer. The first clue to all is not what it seems is when he arrives home and sees what appears to be blood on the stairs leading to the roof terrace where the girl has prepared a special meal and gives him a ring to mark their official engagement. I cannot member at what point I knew the ring was a tracking device.
Confirmation that I was correct came when the two enter the red light district and come across the girlfriend, albeit with a couple of rolls of fabric but as Travolta queries why in the same building.
Travolta goes with Meyer to his flat for a meal with girl friend and her friend who during the meal takes a phone message and says Rose is not here. Travolta shoots her saying Rose as a code word also on the phones of others they connected with and that Meyer‘s girl friend is one of them. Meyer contests but when Travolta shows that the ring is a tracking device and that the flat is bugged, subsequent it is found that there are over a dozen bugs and five cameras, the girl shoots Meyer and then escapes using dramatic athleticism.
The two agents then work out that object of the terrorist attack is the USA delegation to a conference and Travolta goes chasing a vehicle which he believes the girl and one another are travelling to attack the delegation as it travels from the airport to the conference centre. Meyer recovering at home suddenly works out this is diversion and the main threat is at the conference where he believes the girl friend will be gaining entry as a delegate. He goes to the centre warning Travolta who nevertheless has to try and stop the vehicle with the co conspirator and which is still set on attacking the diplomatic convoy. He succeeds in the last seconds before the vehicle collides with the convoy.
At the conference Meyer cannot get in because the girlfriend has used a duplicate of his pass but fortunately he sees the ambassador who vouches for him. He had difficulty indenting his former girl friend and when he does he pleads with her to live and not detonate the bomb strapped to her body. When she hesitates, hope builds but when she goes to detonated he shoots her in the head and she falls back into the arms of Travolta to prevent the bomb exploding as she hits the ground.
Travolta has a private jet waiting to take him to next assignment and they play a game of chess from a travel set before he boards beating if the newly formed team are to stay together for sequels. What do you think?
This brings me to the treat of the week Treme which takes a very serious twist.
The first is that having obtained the evidence that the brother had been arrested and taken into custody a judge dismiss the defence of the city council and says that to hold someone who should not have been arrested in custody for six months and frustrate the attempts to locate him is an example fo the worst of the city and demands the prisoner is produced within 72 hours or the authorities will be in contempt. The police then provide Goodman’s wife, Toni, with the photos and info on nearly 600 prisoners held out city and the brother is not one of them. Finally Daymo is found among the bodies held in a lorry park full of bodies held by the city authorities. The sister asks for the body to be held for a few days more while her mother recovers from her ill health and Mardi Gras is over.
Goodman is seen before a class of University students in which he reads to them excerpts from a book about the previous flood and the approach of the city. Time has changed nothing except for the worse. While Toni is out working Goodman decides to work on his novel but before this creates a new You Tube rant criticising fellow Americans who complain of Katrina fatigue and making the point that the city is being strangled by indecision and political and other interests.
This is also brought home by Indian Chief Albert who breaks into the deserted 5000 place residential Calliope project centre which is under federal Control and kept empty. He contacts the media and then police anticipating being arrested. He is not and is visited by a community relations police officer who explains that with elections coming up there is no public pressure on the politicians to put pressure on the Federal authorities to make use of the project to enable existing New Orleans residents to return. He returns to advise that unless he leaves overnight the police will be back to remove him forcibly. When Albert refuses to get on the floor he is beaten up before being taken into custody.
Davis has been making lots of money from sale of his protest record Shame Shame Shame and is approached by an emissary from a Judge support another candidate who offers a Get out of Jail card for when he gets into trouble in the future, if he drops of out of the campaign because the latest opinion poll shows he has over $5 of the votes which are being taken away from the favoured candidate who is at risk of as a consequence. He accepts the offer but also works on a new record criticising the local administration.
He discoverers that his girl friend has shut the restaurant down and he then finds that she has bought a mobile kitchen and van with insurance compensation money which starts of successfully at an outdoor festival. Annie is recommended to join a Cajun group who have been booked for a three week Canadian tour but she performs badly at the audition because a friend suspect she is in a state over the break up with the boyfriend. Antoine has a paid gig with a band he organises playing for new arrivals at the airport arranged by his friend Danny who is ill in hospital and who dies and he is given a traditional funeral for members of the family. There is some excellent jazz among all the seriousness.
Today I begin with the first of retrospective film notes and the first 8 Women which I saw at the Bolden Cineworld on 27th December 2002. Because the experience was nine years ago I am not attempting to recount the story but give my memories or memory if I have them. The first is that there were some young people in the 20.20 evening performance who did not appreciate that the film was in French with English subtitles and created a disturbance before walking out. After this incident the staffs were at pains to advise customers when other subtitled films were shown. The film was a curious concoction more an Agatha Christie who did it, than comedy with some singing added. I remember some great visuals and although the 8 women were reported well known I only knew of Catherine Deneurve and Danielle Darrieux then and still.
My only other note is that I saw the film over a New Year between visiting by birth mother and my care mother whose health had deteriorated as a consequence of the incompetence of her General Practitioner and a Health Visitor. The GP subsequently apologised but the Health Visitor lied, a strong charge but one which can be proved. Within three months my birth mother had died in hospital where she had not wanted to be admitted and a result of several levels of failure and incompetence. I spent years going through the changing complaints procedures being mislead by various levels of officialdom. I hope to one day become sufficiently emotionally detached to write up this aspect of the tragedy in some detail.
The second film also has 8 and women in the Title but with the addition of a half- 8 ½ women, neither film to be confused with 8 which covers 8 short films or 8 ½ the Fellini film which I reviewed recently along with the musical version called 9. Having said this, 8 ½ women is an English language homage to 8 ½ in so far as a father and his son use their wealth to establish their personal harem to bring women on contracts to live as their concubine.
I did not immediately remember anything about the Peter Greenaway directed and written film which I saw at the Newcastle Film Theatre 10 January 2000, over a decade ago. As soon as I read the story notes I remembered several visual images and that the women were carefully selected for their different specialities. The other aspect which I do remember is that the film was more of a verbal exercise and that despite the subject there was no portray sexual activity as has become the custom.
The available notes remind that among the collection interesting and challenging females is someone who yearns to be a nun, a girl who loves horses and sleeps with a pig, a Norwegian bank clerk, a female impersonator who is female, a compulsive Japanese slot machine player, someone who wants to be made pregnant so she can sell the babies, a woman selling her body and a woman in a wheel chair who accounted for the half plus one other. I remember the film as fun and of no consequence.
The third and final film of this first film memory note is Thirteen Days which covered the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came closest to Nuclear World War. 13 days which has the same title as the book by Robert Kennedy was based on another book called The Kennedy Tapes inside the White House and also included more recent material then declassified. I saw the film at the Bolden Cineworld on 21st March 2001. The Missile Crisis has been covered by several books, films and documentaries. The USA government discovered Missile sites on Cuba with preparation of new sites and instituted a naval blockade to prevent the arrival of further Missiles and supplies from Russia in October 1962. The USA had before this deployed a similar range of intercontinental and medium range missiles aimed at Russia in Turkey and Italy. There was an exchange of threats and secret agreement negotiated through the UN General Secretary which led to the sites being removes as were the 1961 USA sites in Turkey and Europe., Reading notes on the actual event I query with myself if I knew before that unknown to the President the military had moved the state of readiness to Defcon 2, with Defcon 3 the state of alter reserved for War and initiated a trial of an offensive rocket, again without the approval or knowledge of he President. The film starred Kevin Costner in a role which has no basis on reality. I have no memory of the film visual or otherwise.
The latest episode of Blue Bloods was predictable and disappointing. The theme was the limitations of the rule of law and justice systems which in addition to the presumption of innocence with out proof of guilt, requires the highest standard tests of proof and with it the danger that guilty persons will not be convicted because of technical mistakes. In this instance, a vicious serial rapist is released and being the USA is greeted with acclaim by individuals who are attracted to such characters.
The evidence is that the man will attempt to kill a most recent victim who barely escaped with her life and has not been willing to testify in open court. It was quickly evident that the man had set his sights not just on eliminating the witness but the daughter of the police chief Assistant DA. My suspicion that he had sights on the daughter was quickly confirmed when on providing round the clock protection for the potential witness they captured a disguised look alike fan while the serial rapist murderer attends to his preferred target. When the daughter decides to work late at the office dismissing the plea from one of brothers to be careful and father arranges to join her for a meal opposite the building and then proceeds when she does not arrive without first going over to the building to check you know what is going happen.
Fortunately when the son phones father to express his concern father goes over to investigate and shoots the man as he holds the daughter hostage. At least we were saved the round the table meal at the end of the episode although this take place earlier with the usual homilies.
I also like the sound of a new Sky 1 series called Runaway which was advertised as crime in 60’s Soho. As someone who spent many nights in Soho Jazz clubs, its pubs, and hot sandwich bars, among the ladies of the night, I never encountered violence or sight of criminal goings on. The programme followed familiar tracks with a prostitute mother, pimp father, boxing ambitions for the son, and a difficult life for the daughter. I never worked out the Soho link.
I have watched one new film on the Sky Anytime TV module. From Paris with Love staring a difficult to recognise John Travolta and a Johnny Depp look alike Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Myers plays an assistant to the USA Ambassador in Paris who has willingly been recruited to undertake non combative intelligence gathering which includes planting a bug in the office of someone visited by the Ambassador. He also plays chess with the Ambassador thus indicating his intellectual thinking ahead and food memory skills. After expressing an interesting in having a more active roll he is asked to help out a special operative (John Travolta) because of an immediate lack of anyone else available. This is one of several nonsense aspects of the story but without which there would be no story.
His first task is to get Travolta away from customs because he had kicked up a fuss about not being able to bring cans of beer into France. Meyers slaps a diplomatic bad on the cans which in fact contain Travolta’s favourite weapon. Given that he has volunteered Meyers is unbelievably naive about what his role is likely to involve and the first half of the film comprises Travolta shooting and killing half a dozen employees of a Chinese restaurant where a vast quantity of cocaine is stored between ceiling of the ground floor and first floor which rains down when Travolta knowingly shoots holes all over, asking Meyers to collect a substantial amount in a large Chinese vase.
He first explains that the daughter of the senior Government official has got involved in drugs and they are on a revenge mission to shut the supply line down. He lets one employ live with a message as the basis of getting to the power boss, who we find being entertained by a group Chinese children. Before entering the premises he singled handed deals with half a dozen street yobs and then with the security guards for Mr Big. From Mr Big he wants the name of his supplier and at this point the trail take then to a middle East North Africa source during which experience Meyers loses and regains an antique ring given him by his girlfriend and is required to make his first kill.
They then find the bomb making centre after Travolta reveals the problem is a terrorist plot and not the drugs and when it looks three are escaping they find a way to blow them up before they can and they find a way of blowing up Meyer‘s car as they leave the area in a stolen police car. Travolta is not convinced they have aborted the plot, especially when he sees photos of Meyer on the wall of the bomb making factory.
From the outset Meyer has balanced his official and extra curricular working life with an intense love affair with a fabric designer. The first clue to all is not what it seems is when he arrives home and sees what appears to be blood on the stairs leading to the roof terrace where the girl has prepared a special meal and gives him a ring to mark their official engagement. I cannot member at what point I knew the ring was a tracking device.
Confirmation that I was correct came when the two enter the red light district and come across the girlfriend, albeit with a couple of rolls of fabric but as Travolta queries why in the same building.
Travolta goes with Meyer to his flat for a meal with girl friend and her friend who during the meal takes a phone message and says Rose is not here. Travolta shoots her saying Rose as a code word also on the phones of others they connected with and that Meyer‘s girl friend is one of them. Meyer contests but when Travolta shows that the ring is a tracking device and that the flat is bugged, subsequent it is found that there are over a dozen bugs and five cameras, the girl shoots Meyer and then escapes using dramatic athleticism.
The two agents then work out that object of the terrorist attack is the USA delegation to a conference and Travolta goes chasing a vehicle which he believes the girl and one another are travelling to attack the delegation as it travels from the airport to the conference centre. Meyer recovering at home suddenly works out this is diversion and the main threat is at the conference where he believes the girl friend will be gaining entry as a delegate. He goes to the centre warning Travolta who nevertheless has to try and stop the vehicle with the co conspirator and which is still set on attacking the diplomatic convoy. He succeeds in the last seconds before the vehicle collides with the convoy.
At the conference Meyer cannot get in because the girlfriend has used a duplicate of his pass but fortunately he sees the ambassador who vouches for him. He had difficulty indenting his former girl friend and when he does he pleads with her to live and not detonate the bomb strapped to her body. When she hesitates, hope builds but when she goes to detonated he shoots her in the head and she falls back into the arms of Travolta to prevent the bomb exploding as she hits the ground.
Travolta has a private jet waiting to take him to next assignment and they play a game of chess from a travel set before he boards beating if the newly formed team are to stay together for sequels. What do you think?
This brings me to the treat of the week Treme which takes a very serious twist.
The first is that having obtained the evidence that the brother had been arrested and taken into custody a judge dismiss the defence of the city council and says that to hold someone who should not have been arrested in custody for six months and frustrate the attempts to locate him is an example fo the worst of the city and demands the prisoner is produced within 72 hours or the authorities will be in contempt. The police then provide Goodman’s wife, Toni, with the photos and info on nearly 600 prisoners held out city and the brother is not one of them. Finally Daymo is found among the bodies held in a lorry park full of bodies held by the city authorities. The sister asks for the body to be held for a few days more while her mother recovers from her ill health and Mardi Gras is over.
Goodman is seen before a class of University students in which he reads to them excerpts from a book about the previous flood and the approach of the city. Time has changed nothing except for the worse. While Toni is out working Goodman decides to work on his novel but before this creates a new You Tube rant criticising fellow Americans who complain of Katrina fatigue and making the point that the city is being strangled by indecision and political and other interests.
This is also brought home by Indian Chief Albert who breaks into the deserted 5000 place residential Calliope project centre which is under federal Control and kept empty. He contacts the media and then police anticipating being arrested. He is not and is visited by a community relations police officer who explains that with elections coming up there is no public pressure on the politicians to put pressure on the Federal authorities to make use of the project to enable existing New Orleans residents to return. He returns to advise that unless he leaves overnight the police will be back to remove him forcibly. When Albert refuses to get on the floor he is beaten up before being taken into custody.
Davis has been making lots of money from sale of his protest record Shame Shame Shame and is approached by an emissary from a Judge support another candidate who offers a Get out of Jail card for when he gets into trouble in the future, if he drops of out of the campaign because the latest opinion poll shows he has over $5 of the votes which are being taken away from the favoured candidate who is at risk of as a consequence. He accepts the offer but also works on a new record criticising the local administration.
He discoverers that his girl friend has shut the restaurant down and he then finds that she has bought a mobile kitchen and van with insurance compensation money which starts of successfully at an outdoor festival. Annie is recommended to join a Cajun group who have been booked for a three week Canadian tour but she performs badly at the audition because a friend suspect she is in a state over the break up with the boyfriend. Antoine has a paid gig with a band he organises playing for new arrivals at the airport arranged by his friend Danny who is ill in hospital and who dies and he is given a traditional funeral for members of the family. There is some excellent jazz among all the seriousness.
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