Meanwhile, in Venice
Just in case you missed the pics of Michael Fassbender fassbendering around the Venice Film Festival, where he had two films premiering-A Very Dangerous Method (in which he plays Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Freud and Keira Knightly’s Sabina Spielrien) and Shame, in which he plays a sex addict in Manhattan.
Shame seems to have gotten the better reviews. A Dangerous Method sounds a little like Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers with the Freudianism elevated from subtext to text, not that that will stop me from seeing it. Quite the contrary.
I’d seen the NSFW pics of Shame being filmed but I didn’t realize it was directed by Steve McQueen, who directed MF in Hunger (linking you to my ravings about Hunger). Now I’m determined to see Shame, too(even if I can’t quite imagine who I’ll convince to come with me). If there’s anyone who seems to know how to make good use of MF’s weird, compelling, predatory, fassbenderness, it’s this guy. Plus, it was written by Abi Morgan, who also wrote The Hour.
And of course Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was there too, garnering the best reviews of all.
I know I’ve been boring you senseless with my trawl through the BBC vaults this summer, so just one more. Since I was so unsatisfied with the Simm I got in The Devil’s Whore, I watched his more recent, non-costume-drama, BBC series from this spring, Exile. It sounds tailor-made for Simm (and probably was, by Paul Abbot, who wrote State of Play): London journalist self-destructs on drugs and retreats to the Northern town he grew up in, to find his grumpy sister caring for their Alzheimers’s-ridden dad (the awesome Jim Broadbent). I thought it would be a tear-jerker, though it was billed as a State of Play-style mystery, but the family stuff was touching without being at all maudlin, and the mystery turned out to be way more gothic and horrifying than I was expecting. Plus, you get to see JS do all the things he does best: get high/drunk; lose his shit; rant righteously; fall deep, deep, deep into his own accent; be all tender and needy with women; be one sexy little fuck.
Plus there’s an awesome scene where he and Jim Broadbent rant at each other. Naked. In the bath. That’s right-naked together in the bath.
Very much recommended, if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing. Oh, and since MF and BC got a picture, have one of Simm too:
Otherwise, the boys and I had one of those weekends where we seemed to move around in kind of a puppy pile. We went to the pool and they clung to my shoulders and ankles. We went to our annual college football game, and the six-year-old crawled all over me. We watched Dr. Who jammed up together on the couch. It probably sounds much more cuddly than it actually was-cuddling from a six-year-old and a ten-year-old boy is more like being in a basket of WWF wrestlers than it is like a basket of kittens. Still, I guess we must have needed it, on some level, after the first week of school.
Hope everyone had a good long weekend who had one!