Duke of Burgundy

‘Stylish, sensual and smart’, that’s how Rotten Tomatoes summarises this interesting film from Peter Strickland. The review goes on to say that this film ‘proves that erotic cinema can have genuine substance’. Other reviewers have presented it as a thinking person’s alternative to Fifty Shades of Grey. So that’s a lot to live up to. It is certainly beautifully filmed with many dreamlike visual nods to late 1960s, psychedelia even. It is also very funny in places, the pan across the concentrating and engaged audience at the entomological association which features at least two slightly out of focus, but nicely dressed, mannequins in the back row, for example. I also enjoyed the strange nostalgic world created in some unspecified time and (European) place where the only people are beautiful and slightly stiffly dressed women.

The subject matter is the dilemma of the relationship between the beautiful and submissive Evelyn (‘this is all I have ever dreamed about’) and the more-comfortable-in-cosy-pygamas-Cynthia who becomes less patient and accommodating to Evelyn’s requests as time goes by. Its nicely played mostly with lots of lingering (in both senses) eroticism. The film avoids the most crass S/M cliches (whips etc.) to its credit and the allure of the practices is nicely balanced with a focus on Evelyn and Cynthia and their gorgeous environment – as well as the butterflies and moths that remained enigmatic for me throughout the film.

But I found it slightly disappointing. I hoped for something far more taut. There was too much sentiment and far too much dialogue. Everything was said out loud. I imagined this film with only a quarter of the dialogue. I asked In what way are these women like butterflies? Are they pinned? I concluded that the entomology was an atmospheric addition rather than a central structure or metaphor for the whole film, albeit a beautifully achieved one.

The trailer is here.

David Beckham Into The Unknown

This is not the sort of documentary I would usually enjoy but the link came from a motorcycling site and I downloaded and watched.

Beckham and two old friends fly to Brazil to get away from Beckham’s busy life and to find a few weeks of anonymity. And crucially for me – otherwise I wouldn’t be watching – for some of the journey they ride on nicely customised and hard core looking Triumphs.

BeckhamBrazil1

Whether you consider it interesting and enjoyable or not will depend on your interest in David. If you are a fan you will love it because you see plenty of his good looks and charming banter. From a strictly travel documentary angle it is not very penetrating. From a biking angle, its difficult not to see it in the same mould as the Long Way programs that also feature, and have much of their interest, in the celebs on board. But Beckham and friends’ riding style would make off-road gurus like Simon Pavey wince. There’s no standing on the pegs to be seen. Its more gun the throttle with legs splayed and hope for the best – probably how I would do it despite having watched the Touratech DVD on how they do it on the Dakar. Also there is very little branded motorcycle adventure wear on display, just a (very nicely designed) leather jacket, white t-shirt and jeans.

jacket

As has been said before, David comes over as surprisingly normal and charming both in his (generously proportioned) home in London where we see warm interactions with his family, and out with his friends. Strangely his friends on at least one occasion seem to want to sabotage Beckham’s desire for anonymity. At the end he tells us how few new friends he has made since he became famous and that the next ‘day off’ in his diary is in six weeks time. Although presented clearly as time out for Beckham, I wonder how relaxing this was given the constant filming. I’ll be taking a bit more notice of him after seeing this.

This eloquent review says it all.

Now, where can I get some more tattoos?

Another icy ride


I wanted to get out even thought the temperature showed 4 degrees and there was an icy wind. This was a quick 25 mile blast to West Wratting and I came back with Bertha covered in the salt and shit from the wet roads.

A ride in the cold

The solution to Everytrail failure was to shell out the £15 for a licence for Adze. What the Everytrail web page did was to cleverly separate out the different active logs from the Current.gpx file that the GPS unit writes so that you can select the one you want to investigate and to share. Adze can read this file and show each active log that can then be exported as its own GPX file.

Today I braved the cold with so many layers of clothes I could barely move and my huge enduro boots that I haven’t worn for a while adding to a general stiffness. It wasn’t an inspired route but as Bertha was hard to start I am glad not to have left it any longer. I wish the garage had a power supply. Here is the route, 40 miles in all.

And now that I’ve worked out how to do it, here is another ride from just before Christmas, made from combining two separate logs.

Alternatives to Everytrail

Mysteriously Everytrail seemed to stop importing tracks from my Garmin a couple of months ago. I tweeted this a while back and got offers of help from the Garmin support people but when they realised that the problem was with a third party they said they coudln’t help. Emails to Everytrail’s so called helpdesk have not produced any response. GPS guru Geoff Jones has suggested TripTrack, a European equivalent and it even imports everything from Everytrail, so, as long as it really does embed these trips onto blog posts then I will use it. There should be one here:

That’s a hopeful start.

More talk about cameras

I have treated myself to a(nother) camera from Ebay, a Nikon D610 and from another source, a slightly old school 50mm f/1.4 lens. I only ever dreamed about lenses like that as a young teenage photographer with an East German SLR bought for me by my parents. At last, a full-frame camera again, the first since my faithful Pentax purchased in 1983 at the airport in Singapore on the way to my first visit to Australia which still mostly works (I mean the camera still mostly works – not Australia). The lens produces beautiful shallow depth of focus shots like this one:

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and it is almost indistinguishable in bulk from my current and soon to be sold small frame camera:

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