Caboose

I joined the Heffers video club today, I got a bit fed up with Blockbuster on Mill Road only stocking the current Hollywood stuff. As my first video I got 101 Rekjavík.

About all I can say is it passed a couple of hours tolerably. Like the life of the main character it doesn’t seem to go anywhere and I was quite surprised when I read the IMDb entry to find that it’s supposed to be a comedy.

Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it. I tend to be quite forgiving of films I don’t like, prepared to give them another chance. The only exceptions so far have been Volcano and Event Horizon.

Volcano was the last film I saw in the UK before going South and was one of those group decisions, where you all end up seeing the film none of you wanted to see.

Event Horizon was just unforgivably bad. If they had just copied a bit more of some of the films it’s derived from it would have been better, or at least so-bad-it’s-funny. Instead it was just dire. People walked out in the middle of it.

Today has been a pleasantly lazy day, got up late, wandered into town, wandered around town and had lunch at the Arts Picture House bar.

I recently joined up as a Friend of the Picturehouse so I’ve get to see a couple of films for free. Pretty much on a whim I decided to watch AKA.

It’s not a very happy film, which suits me as I tend to prefer dark or miserable films. The plot summary on IMDB doesn’t do it justice, there’s more information on the film’s site and at Picture House Cinemas. Several of the reviews miss out the point that the writer/director, Duncan Roy, based the film on his own life.

The director’s technique of showing three frames side by side, often different versions of the same scene, was intrusive at first but soon I didn’t notice it, in much the same way as subtitles. It worked really well to show how the characters could have different perceptions of the same events.

One slight technical problem I noticed was that it looked like it was being projected from a video projector rather than film and there was an irritating background buzz.

Wandering along Mill Road today I noticed that one of the estate agents had its window boarded up. In the middle of the board was a small sign:

It was not a brick
Somebody jumped/was pushed through the window
He wasn’t seriously injured
Due to the size of the window it will be some time before it is repaired
We are still open for business

(or something like that, my memory isn’t great).