Nice French thriller with all the right ingredients, red-herrings that throw you off the track, a twist at the end then another twist. Its pulse quickening. However, it lacked the aesthetic vision of films like Diva which another director could have brought.
Moving relentlessly on
Yesterday I snuk upto the theory test centre and passed my motorcycle theory test. The two men running the centre made jokes about ageing bikers. I expected the hazard perception part – where 14 one minute videos are shown on your pc screen of road scenes and you have to click when you notice hazards developing – to be tricky, not in the spotting of them (I have been driving for many years) but in what is the right technique to convince the computer programme that you have spotted them early and are not clicking at random which gets you a nil points. I had spent a few weeks with the highway code and a thick book of bike theory test questions. Some are easy e.g. you need to replace your battery. how do you dispose of the old one? a) at a garage b) at a recycling centre c) leave it on waste ground (I can’t remember d).
I got 100% (35 out of 35) for the multiple choice and 54/75 for the hazard spotting (the pass mark is 44). So I am on course for the riding course in July. There is still the question of finding the money to buy a bike – assuming that I pass (and my son today passed his driving test first go and that is something to live up to.))
My latest scheme: learning to ride a mo*orcy*le
I’ve had a few rather stereotypical male things I’ve wanted to step out and do for years (an earlier one was shaving my head). This one has been lurking since my late teens when as the assistant to an ageing biker youth hostel warden in Litton Cheyney in Dorset I was ferried around by gentlemen riding large machines. I remember one ride on a beautiful Sunday evening in summer riding from Dorset up to Royal Crescent in Bath on the back of a BMW bike. Getting to ride a bike is complicated and rather costly now. First there is a motorbike theory test which I take this week, then a 5 session course starting with a CBT (Compulsory basic training) that nowadays anyone who wants to ride anything with a motor needs to have, and ending with taking the bike test on a 500cc machine. Hoping I pass, after that there is the question of buying a bike. I already have a rather nice jacket from ebay for a tenner.
Scott Walker 30th Century Man
This film has stayed with me over the few days since I saw it. I always loved the old songs but was really alerted to him listening to tracks from his latest album on Late Junction. The songs were harrowing and sometimes difficult to listen to.
The film showed him intelligent and thoughtful about his work, and surrounded by producers arrangers and musicians who are also serious and excellent at what they do.
To educate myself I’ve just bought the flop ‘Scott4’ released then deleted in 1969 (From Fopp for £5), via Nightlines (I think it was called) I plan to come upto date with his last two releases.
My Cat is coughing up broken glass
My cat is somewhere in the house and starts coughing up large pieces of broken bottle and blood, or is it wine? I look around and see he has broken a bottle by knocking it on the ground. I start to panic and wonder how I can call the vet.
The Lives of Others
Last night I saw The Lives of others, the much acclaimed debut feature film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Maybe because of the last vestiges of jet lag I found all the preceeding adverts and trailers boring and tiring so that by the time the film started I was already flagging. It played in a packed screen 1 at the cambridge picturehouse i.e. lots of people.
Its a good film, very plot and character driven, exploring the reign of the Stazi, state security surveillance in former East Germany during the 1980s before the wall came down in 1989, the year of my older son’s birth. The plot centres around a writer and his girlfriend (who is signalled to be sensuous in virtually everyshot). The real focus is around one Stazi surveillance expert who is detailed to listen in on their bugged flat and record any incidents of transgression on a nice old manual typewriter in the block’s attic (echoing Casablanca’s radical idealist couple, the operation is called ‘operation Lazlo’). Like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the interloper, Weisler, becomes drawn into the values and lives of the couple, and eventually sabotages the Stazi’s final plan to arrest him. Finally we see him in post-reunion Germany but I won’t say too much. The best and most poetic moments for me are when we see Weisler reading from a Brecht volume that he has stollen from the writer’s flat, and later see him moved to tear’s by the writer’s playing of Beethoven (I think) on his piano after a director friend has committed suicide. In a largely plot driven film, I found there was little poetry and economy and sometimes things felt rather laborious. However, overall this was a moving film and probably worth seeing.