Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Well the list is out for the Oscars. There’s loads I haven’t seen but in the same way that I like to sample the Booker shortlist, I’ve been having a go at catching up with the nominees I’ve been working my way through some of the Irish offerings this weekend. Last night I watched Banshees of Inisherin and I have just finished The Quiet Girl. I know Banshees is getting high praise indeed, and I can see it is the sort of thing that wins awards, but although I admired it, I didn’t love it.  It looks lovely and the conceit is very clever, with the civil war in the background, and the artist giving all up for his art, regardless of cost.  The black comedy is clever - the smack of the finger hitting the door is both awful and funny, as is the tragedy that results from the petty squabble that just goes on and on, indefinitely it seems. I realise I am swimming against the tide here but it felt a bit caricatured to me and I just wasn’t convinced despite the heavy lifting by Colin Farre...

  After a seven hour pilgrimage I have spent the afternoon in darkness with about 350 strangers, Paul Mescal, Anjana Vasan and Patsy Ferran. After failing to be organised enough in advance to get tickets for the resolutely sold out A Streetcar Named Desire we decided to have a last ditch attempt at getting returns.  So, I left home at 6.45am, arriving to grab places 11th and 12th in the returns queue at just before 9.  We finally got our call for tickets at 1.45pm when the auditorium was already open for the matinee and we had just decided to stick out the queue to the evening. The play as performed here is spare, the distilled essence of all that theatre is about.  A bare stage in a tiny theatre creates an intensity to start with and the deceptive simplicity of the staging with intricate choreography and evocative sound and music meant there was nowhere to look except at the performances and the stark reality of the power play between and within the sexes. ...

 Well a lot more streaming has been consumed over the past week or so.  I had intended to get out more but rail engineering works and then flooding/trees /landslides on tracks meant I gave up my intended trips into London.  And I still haven’t managed to get tickets for Paul Mescal in Streetcar at The Almeida.    So, instead I have found myself subscribing to two more streaming services (BFI and MUBI - both trials at the moment but I am terrible at cancelling subscriptions). Little Joe Strangely gripping slow burn sci-fi thriller with hints of Day of the Triffids.  Looks great,  all red and green colours, a scratchy, eerie soundtrack and sense of something looming.  With Ben Whishaw, Emily Beecham, Kerry Fox and Kit Connor, Little Joe is a genetically engineered plant named after its creator’s son, and designed to respond to human care.  As the adolescent human son is increasingly left to his own devices, the plant baby, a potential cuckoo in...

Sam Mendes' own tribute to cinema, this had all of the bits that you would hope for in a homage to cinema of his youth, and with clear tributes to Cinema Paradiso amongst others, and so it was a lovely trip down memory lane for me.   Empire of Light is set in 1980-81 in a seafront cinema in Margate and focuses on Hilary (Olivia Coleman) the deputy cinema manager, who clearly has a challenging past, and her relationship with new colleague Steve (Micheal Ward).  Anyone who was around in that period will remember the air of faded glamour, and glory days long past that hung around cinemas in that period.   I was an usherette in the Barking Odeon between 1978 and 1980, and so I spent my time at the cinema yesterday in a little haze of nostalgia, from the empty and dusty function rooms full of stacked chairs, and the feel of the empty place when there were no customers,  to the sweet stand at the front, and the meticulous collection and audit of the tickets....

Contains little spoilers … I don’t quite know where to start with this.  A clever black comedy, apocalyptic disaster movie, family melodrama, pretentious academia, car crash theory and a great dance number to end.   I haven’t read the book this is based on, but I understand it has been long considered unfilmable.  I can see why but I’m also glad Noah Baumbach gave it a try.    There are some wonderful set pieces, opening with an academic lecture about the joy and escapism in car crashes in film and then we meet Adam Driver as an insecure but pretentious and successful academic and his family who are fascinated with plane crashes and disaster on the tv.  The soundtrack is full of chatter, radio, tv and the distracting background of lives but there’s also a constant underpinning of dread.  You know something is coming. There’s a fantastically pretentious bravura  show off lecture battle between Driver (on Hitler) and Don Cheadle (on Elvis) and the...

Those dead days after Christmas and into the new year have left me with time on my hands.  I'd usually be reading a lot, but I'm a bit stuck on my current read, and so found myself drifting to the telly instead.  It's a bit scary to think about how many hours I have probably clocked this week. Mayflies A very non-celebratory first watch of the year goes to this two part drama on iplayer. The first episode opens with Tully (Tony Curran) telling his longstanding best friend, Jimmy (Martin Compston) that he has months to live, and then, relying on friendship forged as teenagers, makes him promise that he will get him to Switzerland in time. So, not a particularly cheery start but we are soon in a nostalgic hymn to youth, life, death and friendship, illustrated with instamatic colours, The Fall, New Order and riot police.  I found it all pretty moving, probably because I am a sucker for nostalgia and this has it in spades. The second episode gives us revelations on what actua...