(no subject)
10 INPUT “Are you ready for two movie reviews?”, A$
20 If A$=”No” GOTO 10
30 READ ON
The weekend was something of a trial for me as I have decided - on the basis of Terrie’s advice - to go cold turkey and cut caffeine out of my life forever. The idea is that my system has now learned to be so dependant on the artificial boost coffee gives me that it now needs caffeine simply to function normally. I wake up in the mornings needing coffee just to fill the hole the last boost left me with, without getting any of the good stuff anymore like hyper-awareness or feeling lively. Theoretically, once my system learns to stop being dependent on caffeine then I will have much more verve and pep.
We will see. So far it has meant three days of pounding headaches, an emotional sense of detachment and regular afternoon naps. I’m giving it another day and then cracking open the Arabica. It’s just like being addicted to real drugs, although I understand heroin is even more moreish.
To distract myself, I went to the Curzon Cinema with Spimlau and Clarabelle to see El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes). The story supposedly concerns an unsolved 25 year old rape/muder case, and the retired police detective who will not rest until it was solved. I therefore expected about an hour of said policeman running around, moping up blood splatters with cotton wool buds and reading through old newspaper clippings. In actual fact, the case was solved shortly after the murder, in a process which took about two minutes (it seems you can always spot a rapist because he’s in all the photographs you have of the victim, and he’s looking all doe-eyed at her). Anyway, weak detection aside it was a light character drama with a dark soul and with much - I’m sure - to say about Argentinean judicial corruption, if only I had the political context to interpret it.
I think the fact this movie won the Oscar for best foreign films says more about the rest of the competition that year than the film’s own achievements, but I would still score it sixteen out of eighteen murdered high-school sweethearts.
We ate pizza and then wine in Jeffrey Bernard’s old haunt, then bed.
On Sunday I went to see Sir Scott Pilgrim Verus The World, and my view largely matches that reported (separately) on Twitter by Dan and Giles Coren: it was massively over-hyped, and there was far too much fighting. I’d add to this that while the story and actors were all excellent, the director’s insistence on trying to be wacky and weird just got irritating: I soon grew tired of the endless use of video game motifs. Furthermore, a strange throw-away concept about sub-space portals damaged the entire first act, creating awkward dream sequences which were only half reality and which didn’t serve the story at all. Reading up on the source material (most of which - oddly - was penned at the same time as the film), it sounds like it makes much more sense as a six volume comic book.
Still, I can’t hate any film which contains a gay Kieran Culkin and the line “You punched my boob”. I score this film seveteen hundred gold coins out of a potential one thousand, nine hundred and two.
Then Paul cam home from Glasgow and we ate hummous, and I ended the weekend wondering why the supermarkets now call breadsticks ‘gressini’. Is there a difference? Of all the things to glam-up, a long thin stick of dry bread is really scraping the barrel.