Since before Christmas I have stopped being artman Joseph Grech and returned to concerns in my former life with has proved challenging, I hoped to use short cuts but have decided that I need to do three things due to ill health and finding out that others have travelled along part of route I had been taking. I need to record the completed work which is piled behind my chair and also add pages to appropriate files which I did earlier afternoon with the financial records files and then completing two development files and making good progress with a third.
It is midday 14th march and I have been procrastinating doing bits of this or that or just playing games on the computer. But I have made Doctor appointment for Monday at 9,30 as a cough persists after taking a court of antibiotics. This is worrying and will leave the health catch up until Monday. I am hovering above 16 stone in weight having got below 16 for several days earlier when I was full of cold and eating little. From having reach well over 8 hours average for the great part of the year before the check with the Consultant in November I had had a difficult period with the bad cold boarding on bronchitis. I reached as low as 7 hours at one point and feared I would go even lower. However I have steadily improved over the past week back to 7.6.
I still play games against the computer with patience achieving a run of 1500 consecutive wins with previously 1350 and a total of 3000 wins. I have at last, risen from kevel 4 chess to level 5 with 101 consecutive wins.
I have remade the bed well and start in a deep clean dusting purge in the front room which I have now left three quarters completed as I would have wished as by heart is not in it. I have decided to continue over the weekend with some optimism with catch up notes while I also continue to clean the ground floor of the property.
Today my catch up begins with films as the season of the British Academy Awards and Oscars is underway. The Catch up coves the past year and I am drawing heavily on Wikipedia for the plot summaries.
Films with traditional jazz or swing band music are few and far between. Paris Blues was shown again during the year and enjoyed. The film has Joanne Woodward and Dianne Carroll from the USA playing two young women having a trip of a lifetime in Paris encountering Paul Newman at the station who invites to visit the Jazz cub where he plays with Sidney Poitier a refugee from home racism and under the conventions of the day the two couples becomes paired according to race. Carroll is strait laced and only interested in a conventional relationship and returning home while Newman already has a woman friend and is not interested in anything serious. Needless to say the women dictate what happens and there is some good jazz with Dike Ellington heading the sound track and with Louis Armstrong guesting.
All Night Long (1962) has music by David Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan Tubby Hayes, Chico Hamilton Thelonius Monk, Sonny Stitt, Anita O Day, George Shearing, Dinah Washington. Louis Armstrong. In this black and white film story is irrelevant.
The most important me film has been Jazz on a Summer’s day viewed the day after my release from the six months in prison for Operation Foulness in 1960, The film featured many of the artists used as a backing track to the film All Night Long including Louis Armstrong who I have seen live in Croydon as well as jack Teargarden, the Trombonist. The audience is older and college kinds 1960 style in contrast from those attending the Soho Oxford Street jazz cellars in the fifties and early sixties. The film intersperses the Jazz festival at Newport Rhode Island with the Americas Cup races in1958 which added to emotions of my experience.
I also experienced Lady Sings the Blues again, the story the great jazz singer Billie Holiday whose records I have on several disk sets. The film follows her life and addiction with loss of licence. And struggle to regain with a concert at Carnegie Hall, the classical music venue which also hosted some key Jazz performs including Benny Goodman where I still hold the two volume LP set. Although she make to Carnegie Hall going back in drugs she fails to regain her licence and dies at the age 44 but her back catalogue is extraordinary and makes her one her jazz immortals. The film is week made with Diana Ross in the role and making a good stab at recreating the voice.
Its Trad Dad 1962 cashed in on the revival of traditional jazz in 1957 964 in the UK before being overtaken by Rock and Roll. The film has echoes of Blues Brother as the city father do everything they can to sop a live show after a couple of teenagers appeal to David Jacobs to promote the cause after a Juke Box is removed from a local coffee shop,
I have only seen the 1930 Paul White Band film King of Jazz on TV,. Unfortunately Bix Biederbeck had left the band just before the film was made but Joe Ventui had not and Bing Crosby has an appearance. The tile is a stretch and is more a musical with Busby Berkley type scenes.
Shorty Rogers and his band play he outstanding soundtrack to Man with the Golden Arm the story of a drug addict with Frank Sinatra in the Title Role Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker play the two women I his life
And now for something very different an extraordinary and brilliant political drama called Knife Fight with Bob Lowe from the West Wing in the main role as and a political media fix it. There is not any scandal which he cannot swing round to favour his client but find one event to far when he rubbishes a young woman who one Governor has seduced and misled and attempts to take her own life with the subsequent media attention.
Against his better judgement he is is persuaded by his assistant Intern who eanting to train as doctor to spoort a local welare doctor who decided to stand for govenor without funds, party support or experience. She is seen on prime time TV and the Internet persuading a druggy to hand over the knife he has at the neck of a staff member learning only later this was a stunt arranged by the Intern and his friend dark arts arranged played by Richard Schiff. She wins the race narrowly to close the film with the assistant going off to be a doctor and Rob although back to his job after going off into the wilderness, trying to nation some kind of standard in what has been anything goes business.
Another different genre which did not impress was teh lastest in the Bruce Willis Die Hard series A Good Day to Die Hard, The film is best view in Imax 3D with Dolby surround sounds for the stunning visul effects galore ( there is little else ) but I saw on TV. The basic plots has Willis ona job which takes him back to Moscow and where he finds that his estranged son has been working undercover for th CIA for three years and through the course of the adventures shared together they make up and save each other’s life countless times. There is a complicated ploy of villains cuner viallans and villain bluff which you do not have to pay close attentiomn to enjoy the fun a waste of time nevertheless.
The Dark Hour is a Spanish Film la Hora Fria made in 2007 in which a group battle to survive against aliens. However as the films draws to a close we learn that the action has taken place in a refuge on the Moon with earth already devastated devoid of human life. At one level film is a warning that man needs to wake up and take collective action to save the plant. At another it is a depressing tale of the weakness of man against eternal force whether of nature or extra terrestrial.
Gangster Squad is loosely based on the true story that the Los Angeles Police department had an undercover hit squad to taking out organised crime by any means. Tales of such unit have been the subject of films before. The complication in this story is also not new with the main characters wife and family under threat and another character, something of a play boy becoming involved with the woman Emma Stone of the gangster leader Sean Penn. Nick Notle plays the honest police chief. The film engaged for a couple of hours.
Savages 2012 was a more enjoyable adventure romp which feature two young men in a an openly shared relationship who work out a way to create a potent form of pot which makes them a fortune which they put great use in addition to their own beach lifestyle. However a powerful Mexican drug baron( female) sends her enforcer Benicio Del Torro to make then an offer they cannot refused as does a corrupt Drug Enforcement Agency played by John Travolta. The film is long 131 mins and has a good ending.
Victim is intended as a serious film about the poverty crime circle when two lifetime friends use a sexy young woman to lure wealthy men from the city using the London life who are then robbed, One of the young men use the money to pay for the education of his 15 year old sister and the gambling debts of his other. Just when things go well after he meet a girl from the other side of tracks his moth steals everything he has and takes up the offer of a crime boss to participate in a big job. The outcome is predicable. Mark Kermode was but on of the critics that pointed out that the delivery of the message had several shortcomings but is was a good start by the director Ale Pillai.
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