Monthly Archives: March 2007

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Mirror Mirror

More from the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival:


Mirror Mirror

This is really hard to review, partly because it’s part of a PhD thesis and in some ways is quite a personal project, and partly because it’s so London/Wotever-centric. It still feels like a work in progress. I think it must be very difficult to edit a film you’ve made with/about your friends, and within those constraints it’s a good film; but without those constraints it might have been a better film. But I really liked it as an experimental or exploratory film, and I liked it as a showcase for Club Wotever. It had lots of interesting ideas and I could imagine some of them being made into more focussed short films.

(I abuse the word ‘really’ almost as much as I abuse the word ‘lovely’. And Bar Wotever afterwards was lots of fun and I didn’t even have a hangover the next day.)

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The Bubble

I would review the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival shorts ‘Trouble and Strife’ but owing to a mix-up with daylight savings (i.e. I forgot) I missed the session. I had a lovely time catching up with people in the new back cafe at the NFT so I can’t really complain.

The Bubble

I really, really recommend this film. It’s set in Tel Aviv (and made me want to visit, except that the politics make it kinda complicated), and is basically a love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian guy. That’s not all it is, obviously because of the religious, historical and political issues, but also because it’s firmly grounded in the everyday lives of a group of friends who are figuring out who and what they want to be while enjoying the best and coolest life Tel Aviv has to offer. The ‘bubble’ refers to life in Tel Aviv compared to the rest of Israel, but I think it could also refer to that stage of life where you and everyone you know are young and beautiful and life is relatively uncomplicated.

To me, the depictions of Israeli/Palestinian relations seemed fair, but really I can’t judge. It certainly gave me a more concrete understanding of what life might have been like for those ‘mad Israeli kids’ you meet backpacking when they’ve finished their military service, and the Palestinian issues with checkpoints were well portrayed.

(And the chick who plays Lulu is hot.)

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Puccini for Beginners

Another LLGFF review:

Mia Minke

Puccini for Beginners

Puccini for Beginners was quite slick, well played, well written and very New York but overall it was strangely unsatisfying. It might just be that I expect more radical content or film-making from festival films, because if I was to see it at my local cinema it would be a lovely date movie. On the other hand maybe I’m spoilt because for the people I know there’s not much that’s shocking about a lesbian falling for a man.

It’s still nice to see a positive representation of queer life on the screen, and I particularly liked the scenes where passing characters broke out of role to engage with the main character’s internal dialogue.

It felt weirdly transgressive watching heterosexual sex in a cinema full of queer at a Lesbian and Gay film festival.

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“Computer giant Dell will start to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems, the firm has said.
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Dell has not released details of which versions of Linux it will use or which computers it will run on, but promised an update in the coming weeks.
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Big business and governments, particularly in the developing world, are also starting to exploit the flexibility of open source code.
The UK Cabinet Office recently evaluated the operating system and approved it as a viable alternative to proprietary systems.” BBC

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Point/Counterpoint: (RED) Raises $100 Million, Spends 82% On Advertising
“(RED), the global co-branding experiment that directs a percentage of (RED) product revenues towards fighting AIDS in Africa, has only directed $18 million out of $100 million spent. AdAge reports that this is raising eyebrows other than our own.”

The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign — which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity — but also for the brands involved.

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I was talking with a workmate about our first computers, and admittedly my experience was different because Dad brought home an old machine from work (a CP/M?) with a magazine of code that you typed in to make games, but generally it was just a conversation about computers… until she said, “wow! that sounds like the 80s” as if we were talking about the 1940s. It was the 80s but I’ve never before felt like it was so long ago.
Still, it’s made me laugh for half an hour so it’s not that bad.

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“Prime Minister John Howard has clashed with Sir Nicholas Stern over climate change, saying the former World Bank chief economist’s views should not be treated as “holy writ” and could do great damage to the Australian economy.
Sir Nicholas has called on Australia to be an international leader in the fight against climate change by slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050, ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and being at the forefront of new technologies, such as clean coal.
But when asked by Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd if he would commit to the 2050 target, Mr Howard declared he would put the national interest first.” The Age
Is he really that short-sighted? Or does he think a political win justifies the environmental damage? From this distance it seems Australia is already suffering the effects of global warming, I don’t understand why it’s not the first country to respond.