47 Ronin

Splashily fantastic rendition of historical Japan as a set of magical islands. 6.5/10.

John Green - The Fault in Our Stars

Had this one for a while - been saving it...I'd avoided specific spoilers but pretty much assumed that someone was gonna die and it didn't take too long to figure out who that was going to be. So, well, it's good and reads remarkably like something that could actually have been written by someone aged 16 (albeit a particularly intelligent and articulate 16) - it's a bit affected and clunky in places, but that makes it feel more real. The cancer, the emotion, the argot, the asking of big questions, the True Love - all ring true. Given the reputation that this one has, I'd kind of been assuming that it would leave me basically devastated, at least immediately after finishing it, but for whatever reason it didn't have that effect; still, it was worth the time it took to read (and probably I didn't immerse myself in it as fully as I might have).

Donnie Darko

I suspect not just for me but for my whole generation (at least the relevant part of it), Donnie Darko has such an aura of the landmark to it that it's very difficult to think about - or watch - objectively. 2001 it came out - not sure whether I saw it at MIFF or afterwards, but either way I'd been keenly anticipating it and it didn't disappoint. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack - that version of "Mad World", of course, and "Under the Milky Way", "Love will Tear Us Apart", "The Killing Moon" (all three iconic for me in their own right, but that last now particularly inseparable from this film).

Revisiting it the other night, all these years on, what's most striking is the strength of the film's vision and the vividness of its imagery and iconography, particularly when Frank is on screen. And also the way it achieves its effect through a combination of the direct and oblique, the literal and the poetic, in a way that one suspects Richard Kelly himself wasn't fully in control of; relatedly, the underdeveloped - and, for me, pleasingly cryptic even if not classically coherent - nature of some of its elements (many of which were fleshed out more in the significantly more explain-y director's cut). It's still pretty great.

Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests

Enjoyable but maybe a bit too straight up, almost old-fashionedly so - which isn't to say that I knew exactly what was coming, nor how Frances and Lilian would turn out (individually, or together). Also, I don't typically look to fiction to be educated, but I did feel that I knew more about life in 1920s London by its end.

(Affinity, The Little Stranger)

Digression

"Digression on Number 1, 1948"

I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Miro, and I see the sea by Leger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner;
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.

Found in the Frank O'Hara selected poems into which I often dip, earlier this evening, savouring a solitary frozen yogurt outside on Faraday Street, listening to Patty Griffin - specifically, her lovely, poignant "Making Pies".

Stop Making Sense

As good as it was last time round, pretty much exactly a decade ago. It's interesting, too, the way that the iconic artists of the past (both canonically and personally iconic, the two categories overlapping a bit but obviously not the same in either contents or intensity) separate out over time - I can't remember the last time I listed to a Talking Heads record all the way through, but Stop Making Sense was a reminder of their quality and also of how their influence continues to infiltrate today.

(w/ David and Justine)

The Newsroom season 2

A bit heavy-handed in places (with Messages), a bit cute in others (with Characters), but The Newsroom is fast-moving, well-acted and appealing - on a number of levels - enough to overcome those flaws. This second season is structured a bit differently from the first, and for the better, and each of the main characters flicks quickly to life - it's hard not to like the ones who we're supposed to like.

(season 1)

David Rosetzky - "Gaps"

Rosetzky's work has interested me the couple of times I've come across it in the past, and this 35 minute video piece (it felt much shorter) had a similar effect - four performers, a choreographed mix of dance (in rehearsal) and speech.

(w/ Julian)

Taylor Swift - 1989

I'm not infatuated with 1989 in the same way that I was with Red, but it's still a pretty delightful, personality-filled pop record, one truly solid song after another, and it still sounds like she just means everything she sings, in a good way.

Bits and pieces, reprises

Found in one of the many small notebooks that I've bought in a miscellany of gallery/museum stores so as to have something to write in, having been caught without the standing 'art' notebook of the time - this one from the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, July 2011:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was in relation to Richard Long; also, a reminder of my own Romantic sensibilities, often obscured nowadays by other artistic etc modes of experience and understanding.

* * *

A while ago - maybe six months or a year back - I woke up with a tune running through my head, as if I'd just been dreaming it. It wasn't one of those that slipped wispily away almost as soon as waking life asserted itself, but rather hung around for a day or two - but I couldn't place it, partly because it didn't come with any words. Fast forward to last weekend, Saturday night around 10pm, stopped into Brunswick Street Bookstore for a quick browse on my way out to a drink; I was the only person in the store (apart from the girl at the counter), and it was that song playing on the system..."Body on the Water", it turns out (Luluc - Dear Hamlyn).

Stephen Mills - The Professionals: Strategy, Money & the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia

I got this from Readings at the same time as The Gatekeepers and have just finished dutifully wading through it - skimming a bit rather than really reading particularly closely. The subject matter is interesting, but truthfully perhaps only somewhat so - at least as treated here, largely through a blow by blow account of how the roles of the ALP federal/national secretary and Liberal Party federal director (and associated national campaign director responsibilities) have developed and professionalised over time.

Gone Girl

A sleekly effective translation of the equally (indeed, even more so) effective book.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

Gentle and ruminative, T.S. Spivet's as much a love letter to a certain idea of America (witness the series of postcard-worthy shots as the titular character crosses the length of the country from Montana to DC by train) as it is a depiction of T.S.'s journey, character and family. The 3d works well, as could have been expected in Jeunet's hands; the whimsy and imagination are there, but dialled down a notch, while the dark edges and grotesqueness of his early films have almost entirely disappeared.

(w/ Meribah)