Cricket bat

Hi everyone, getting excited about a trip to Munich for Stevie Wonder and Oktoberfest - we're going on Thursday. Incidentally, I should mention that here in Italy "Munich" is called "Monaco di Baviera" - Monaco of Baveria - it always gives me fear when I'm buying tickets for Monaco di Baviera because I worry that I might end up with a ticket to (just) Monaco. 

More importantly, I saw this First Dog on the Moon cartoon on the www.crikey.com website and couldn't help but spread the lovin' around...yes, I'm missing references to cricket bats. If it's too small to read then have a better look at it here and I'd like to repeat that it's with thanks to Crikey that the cartoon exists and I got a cricket bat-related laugh today. 

Ciao, Paul.

The nothing month

September is the nothing month - it seems to be the last sigh of procrastination before settling back into something like a working schedule from October through November until the second half of December - and then everything closes again for Christmas! Do these Italians ever do more than three consecutive months of work? Probably not...So Ali and I find ourselves in the situation of Ferragosto being well and truly over - it was August 15 - yet the music bars and the gyms and the african dancing courses are only just starting to re-open, get started, be announced. What was everyone doing during September?


At least October is when I can look forward to regular time in the climbing gym, and Ali can look forward to having a teaching schedule that's regular enough to organise some free-time activities among the choices of joining a band, african dancing, venetian rowing, and "contemporary" singing...


Next week we're off to Oktoberfest in Munich, and Stevie Wonder - should be fun.

Review "The Wrestler" by Darren Aronofsky

This film is tough. Anyone who's seen "Pi" or "Requiem for a Dream" will know that Aronofsky doesn't hold back when it comes to telling a story, and "The Wrestler" follows in that tradition. I can't comment on "The Fountain" because I haven't seen it, and only found out about it last month.

"The Wrestler" tells the story of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, 20 years after his peak as a pro-wrestler. He still wrestles on weekends, in the local scene, but he's a shadow of his glory days - emotionally, financially, physically. The Ram works out the back of a local supermarket, lives in a caravan, has trouble keeping up with the rent, is a regular at the local strip club, lives from day to day, weekend to weekend, fight to fight. Things change when he has a heart attack and is told he can't wrestle - this brush with death leads the wrestler to think about what he is left with when wrestling is taken away. He also seeks to re-establish contact with his twenty-something daughter who has long since moved out and moved on from a father who was never there for her.

This story is paralleled with that of an aging stripper at the club that Randy frequents. Once again, the film explores the options of people who have been used up by their occupations, and are rapidly approaching the point at which they're about to be spat out of a machine that has no more need of them. In the case of the wrestler, there's no plan, no idea and no opportunities - just a big black hole of a world that has moved on way beyond his 80's cock-rock glory days. The stripper has it together and plans on a different job, moving into a house in a different suburb and finding a reasonable school for her son to go to.

The film doesn't go into much of the detail of the wrestling world: very quickly it comes out clean regarding match-fixing if you could even call it that - performance is probably a better word - and doesn't go into the financial exploitation of the wrestlers at all. All of the wrestlers who have it together certainly aren't relying on the sport as their main income. Instead the main theme of the film is that of people who are capable of maintaining control over their circumstances, adapting to change and challenges and not being consumed by their weaknesses, flaws, doubts, fears and addictions. "Pi" and "Requiem for a dream" have already covered that territory well enough, and in a way it feels that perhaps "The Wrestler" hasn't sufficiently distanced itself from that familiar territory. Perhaps after "The Fountain" Aronofsky decided, or was persuaded, to go back to what works and/or what he's known for.

Make no mistake that "The Wrestler" is a fine film and Mickey Rourke's performance is visceral and splendid. The film is violent in parts, not when you expect it to be, and it sets itself in Aronofsky's familiar territory at the unacknowledged and unmentioned fringes of society. There is an abundance of hand-held camera scenes following the wrestler about - giving a similar feel to "Rosetta" or other dogma-influenced films - but the editing is spot-on and the score will remind you how far the rock guitar has gone since the 80's (depending on what you're listening to now...).

Did it deserve to get the Leon d'Oro? Having missed Miyazaki's "Ponyo by the sea" and Barbaret Schroeder's film, I can't say - although as far as displays of filmmaking go, Takeshi did just as well as Aronofsky in my opinion. Mickey Rourke did deserve some acknowledgement of his sensational performance, far more than anybody associated with the terrible "Papa di Giovanna". Based on the few films I saw, I'd have to accede to the viewpoint that the 65th mostra features some fine films but nothing really new (perhaps Schroeter's impenetrably dark queer-fetish "Nuit de chien" came close as a contribution but it leaned a little too heavily on "Eraserhead" and "28 Days Later..." for my liking).

Now that we've figured out the abbonamento system and the "four different ticketing arrangements for three cinemas" anti-system, I think I'm actually looking forward to next years' film festival...

Review "Achilles and the Tortoise" by Takeshi Kitano

Ali and I saw this film in Mestre with Raph, who came down from Geneva for the weekend. The Venice film festival process is interesting to examine - it is more or less a moneymaking machine (Don't know who for, the Venice city council I assume) - with the public, press, industry folk all paying for the privilege of doing deals with other industry folk and watching some moofies. I guess the stars are the only ones who don't have to pay. There are about 20 films in the competition, but they show other films which are being released this year, such as the Coens' "Burn after reading", shorts, re-prints of classic films (such as "The bicycle thieves") and tie-in with other film festivals (Such as the Udine Far East film festival contribution "Monster X strikes back: Attack the G8 summit!"). All up that means that about 30 films are showing each day on the Lido, 4 on Venice and 4 in Mestre (on the mainland). The films that are screened on the Lido usually screen in Venice and Mestre the following day. That's why we found ourselves in Mestre on a Saturday afternoon watching "Achilles and the Tortoise" by Takeshi Kitano. Good aspects of being in Lido to watch the film are that the cinema is quite new with good aircon and comfy seats. Another bonus of the Cityplex Palazzo in Mestre is the high-class gelateria two doors down from the cinema (GROM - highly recommended!). The cinema itself was very stark - you get your tickets on the street from a window, tiny candy bar, then go upstairs straight to the projection room. No chairs, nowhere to wait, nothing to read. Very accommodating...

Takeshi Kitano's "Achilles and the Tortoise" is the latest in his current series of "sentimental" films (Margaret Pomeranz's word) which can be described as slow-moving and dreary sketches of ordinary life (in Japan, anyway). I disagree - the films that Kitano makes have the quality of expressionist paintings - and a bit of wikipedia searching showed that since a motorcycle accident Kitano has taken up painting and his recent films contain his paintings. In A&T the paintings are the film, it's subject is a man whose only aim in life is to make art: painting, drawing, sculpting obsessively. If anything the film shows how oblivious the artist is to everything else in life - the great changes in Japanese society from the artist's birth in the fifties through to now, when the film ends.

The artist is the son of a wealthy Japanese silk merchant, a patron of the arts whose house is filled with modernist paintings and regularly visited by modernist painters. The boy spends all of his time painting and drawing: chickens, rabbits, trains (a surprising flashback to the art brut experience). The artist's social status makes him an untouchable - allowed to wander out of class 'to go drawing' whenever he wants to. It's obvious the boy has talent, the paintings are bright, expressive and juvenile but clearly they have merit.

The artist's situation changes suddenly when the silk business collapses and the creditors step in - his parents go harakiri and the artist suddenly finds himself living with an unpleasant uncle
doing farm chores and denied his pastels. Even in this environment the boy finds bohemian friends and manages to find plenty of opportunities to do art. After a couple of months, the uncle has had enough and the artist gets shipped off to an orphanage in the city. The artists return to the city is closed by the death of his bohemian friend - a half-blind peasant who sits besides the fields and draws day after day - who's hit by a bus.

The overwhelming frequency of suicides in the film is startling. This may be from the cultural aspects of suicide in Japan, or a larger reference to the practice of art as a consuming passion, one which sees them close to the edges of society, acceptability, sanity. The film is a very personal and emotional view of a life lived with passion and determination - the artist is consumed by his work and it oftens drives him to the limits of survival...his university street art period in the 70's, and later experiments in shock art with his wife being very funny episodes in the film. The appearance of the Tokyo Shock Boys repeats this theme of people committing themselves viscerally to their passions - or alternately of people being consumed by their passions, losing reason and ending up dead in a bath while trying to find inspiration from oxygen deprivation. Takeshi straddles this line - while showing huge sympathy and solidarity with the artist and his wife he also acknowledges their daughter's shame, distance and embarrassment deriving from the antics of her certifiable parents.

The title of the film, "Achilles and the Tortoise" refers to a greek philosophical conundrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_the_tortoise) which is used as a metaphor for chasing an unattainable dream. Ultimately it is the unreasonable that makes things interesting, that produces change and confronts the assumptions and complacency of our lives. Kitano's film is certainly sentimental, but it is equally beautiful and heartfelt. In my opinion it would have been one of the contenders for best film or at least best screenplay.