Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Morbid Movies

Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea opened our British Film Week tonight. We'd invited the director and his manager/partner but there was a visa cock-up and in the end neither made it, which was annoying, but c'est la vie. So we had some drinks, vol-au-vents and speeches before settling down to watch the film, which was fabulous on period detail and great performance by Rachel Weisz... but all-in-all I found it rather slight and certainly depressing. Couldn't really feel for any of the characters, and we had a bad 35mm print, full of scratches, the occasional flare and a few drop-outs... unless they were part of the period detail (!?). 
Still, we've got lots of other films to cheer us up. Tomorrow is Dreams of a Life, about a young Londoner, Joyce Carol Vincent, who died alone in her bedsit and wasn't discovered until two years later; Senna, about the F1 racing driver who of course was killed in the line of duty; the newly restored version of Hitchcock's The Lodger about a woman-killer in London; Andrea Arnold's reassuringly bleak version of Wuthering Heights... 
Hang on, don't we have any happy films?!  Yes, we do, both about submarines - one literally (the digitally restored version of Yellow Submarine), the other metaphorically (Richard Ayoade's Submarine, starring Craig Roberts). Well that's all right then.

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