This was my first tight-squeeze day — five minutes to get from the Embassy to City Gallery. \u00a0In the end, I caved and caught a taxi — even if I’d made it between the venues in\u00a0something comparable to five minutes, I wouldn’t have been in a state to watch the movie.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In Love is Strange<\/a>,<\/i> a loving couple decides, after living together for forty years, to finally get married. Unfortunately, they’re a gay couple, and the Catholic school that one of them teaches at is forced by the bishop to fire him – “don’t ask, don’t tell” not being restricted to the military, apparently.<\/p>\n One thing that I liked was that they were shown as ordinary people, and although the crisis was caused by prejudice, everything else that happened was just the sort of consequences that happen to an older couple when the main breadwinner unexpectedly loses his job. (Well, the sorts of things that happen in America, like scrambling to find health insurance.) The priest running the school was sympathetic, there was no random vileness directed at the couple (though one teen did call something that he didn’t like “gay”), and the crises were mostly about family, and how hard it is to be away from your partner.<\/p>\n Indeed, the stereotype I objected to most was the gamers that were ahown – I don’t know of anyone who wears a dopey helmet to run a game. \u00a0On the other hand, they were also a gay cop couple that had regular parties, so it’s not like roleplaying was completely othered.<\/p>\n It was not a film full of shocking swerves, but it kept faking me out about the way it was going to go. \u00a0I liked it.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Gagarin’s village was occupied by the Nazis, and he initially trained as a metalworker; the first man to walk in space grew up in a place where horse was the main way of getting around; the engineer who worked on the launch of Sputnik said that the advantage that the Soviets had in the space race was that their nuclear weapons were heavy, so they needed big rockets for their missiles, which meant that they didn’t need to faff about with multistage nonsense to get the first satellite into space, they just bunged it on their giant rocket and went.<\/p>\n An Invincible Defeat<\/i><\/a> interviewed members of the Soviet space race that I assume would still be feted and inaccessible if they had been in comparable the U.S. programme. \u00a0They did such a lot, some of it by brute force, that it’s amazing to think how much was simply left to rot when the Soviet Union fell.<\/p>\n I’m certainly not sad that the Soviet Union fell; but I’m sad about the good and impressive things that fell away with it.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n What are you hoping for? These were three questions that a reporter colleague of Jane Brown apparently asked everyone he interviewed. \u00a0(Has anynoe made it into one of those daft Facebook memes yet?) \u00a0When the makers of Looking For Light: Jane Brown <\/i><\/a>asked her these same questions, she said that she wished she knew more about her origins, but that she fancied that she had left it too late.<\/p>\n You will have seen a Jane Brown portrait photo<\/a> at some point. \u00a0The iconically craggy, melancholic portrait of Beckett; pictures of Churchill and Mick Jagger, Bjork and the Queen. \u00a0All in black and white, almost all with natural light, and all with an eye for shape and texture. \u00a0And most\u00a0of the early ones for the newspaper The Observer.<\/i><\/p>\n Many people in the film said that she was so good at getting portraits because she was unthreatening — a small, unassuming woman who was polite, but whose “elbows were as sharp as anyone else’s”. \u00a0The filmmakers certainly invited you to believe that part of the reason for her gift with people was how she was handed around from house to house, and had to learn to ingratiate herself into different families.<\/p>\n But however she did it, she made beautiful pictures. \u00a0And she came across as really nice, to boot.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Under The Skin <\/i><\/a>was a film that I wish I could have watched cold – that someone I trusted could have said, “Hey, you’ll enjoy this, just go.” \u00a0If I could have started as confused as Upstream Colour,<\/i> and gone on from there, I wouldn’t have been busy fitting what I saw into the narrative as I’d already had it told to me, or trying to work out who was an actor and who was simply a bystander.<\/p>\n Scarlett Johansen is really good; there’s more full-frontal male nudity than female nudity; there’s plenty of implied larger world built with the most minimal of hints. \u00a0And while they depict the hunt well, they also show how confusing and dangerous the world is all by itself.<\/p>\n I liked it, but I don’t saw it the best way you could. \u00a0And that’s why I disagree with the Idea Channel’s stance on spoilers.<\/a><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n
\nDo you believe in God?
\nIf it was your birthday, what would you want for breakfast?<\/p>\n