Caboose

The latest part of my campaign to get out more was a free members’ preview of Rabbit-Proof Fence at the Arts Picture House.

I thought they had really taken advantage of the scenery and found some fantastic actresses to play the parts of the three aboriginal girls taken from their families to be trained as servants. Kenneth Branagh did a very good job as the Chief Protector of Aborigines, a well-meaning but misguided bureaucrat.

Deborah Mailman also appeared, she’s one of the stars of The Secret Life of Us, one of my favourite TV programs. Sadly Channel 4 are only showing it on their E4 digital channel at the moment. I’m waiting patiently for it to return to normal TV.

Just one thing I noticed: is it just me or does the language spoken by the Aborigines in the film not sound a lot like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi? Is this possibly where the Star Wars people got some inspiration from?

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.