If you’re in London, go see Uncle Semolina (& Friends)’s production of Gilgamesh at the Barbican‘s Pit theatre. But hurry, because it’s only on until October 13.
Category Archives: review
The top 100 travel sites?
From the Times Travel site, 100 best travel websites including Best for holiday bargains (cheap flights, insurance, etc) or Top-value rooms; Road, rail, ferry, cruise (including the fabulous www.transportdirect.info, seat61 (how to get anywhere by rail), deutsche bahn (train timetables across Europe)); Specialist travel (“Cook, dance, trek, surf, paint, go single or go green – these sites will guide and inspire, plus there’s some great tips for travellers embarking on a gap year adventure”) and Travel 2.0 (news and tips from other travellers, but see also Inside info).
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.)
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.
After a week of sunshine it’s back to being cold again and it snowed a bit on Monday and Tuesday. We’ve solved the problem of the lack of heating in the office with a new program of spontaneous Aboriginal Morris dancing.
Ok, quick film review. I’m trying out the hreview microformat at the same time.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee
Itty Bitty Titty Committee opened the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last night. It was an entertaining start to the festival – cute cast, good production values and cinematography, great soundtrack. There was an occasional clunky “here’s the politics” but it wasn’t so bad that it pulled you out of the experience. It’s definitely not a coming out film and I really enjoyed the way being a lesbian was normalised – it wasn’t an issue in scenes set in a family or work environment.
A quick catch-up on things around London:
A few Sundays ago I went on a trek to see Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad at
Paradise Row. Last Sunday I wandered around Shoreditch looking for open galleries. Not much luck at first, except scaffolding pillars outside the Foundary were decorated in different styles, no idea who by.
The final gallery was Flowers East, where I really liked ‘The Person Who…….’ by Jiro Osuga – mostly paintings but there was a room with a table of toys and small paintings that folded out to show a different side.
I also saw Tim Berners-Lee speak (leave a comment or email me for my notes) on Tuesday, and saw Orfeo at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both of which were really rather fabulous.
Very short review: last night I saw Kneehigh Theatre’s excellent production of Cymbeline and enjoyed myself to much I’d go see anything else they did without bothering with published reviews.
Two blogs I have been enjoying lately are design dyke and boicozine. The Antimix Podcasts at boicozine are particularly excellent.
And… breathe.
Work is busy, busy, busy. My brain is slowly collapsing in on itself.
Otoh, I saw Tangram Theatre‘ s brilliant production of 4:48 Psychosis at the Arcola last night and had a lovely dinner then drinks at the Dalston Jazz Cafe.
My brother has been in London for a week now, and so far it’s all going well. We’ve had a few wobbles but that’s only to be expected, and generally we’ve handled them with maturity and consideration, which is just lovely.
It’s ages since I’ve reviewed anything I’ve seen, so to start on the backlog… last night I saw The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National.
I really liked the play itself, but the staging was weird. I don’t know if it was deliberate, but it was as if the past forty years had never happened. It might have been intentionally retro, which is why I’d love to hear what they intended.
The staging, particularly in the first part, just seemed amateurish. It really distracted from the performances and the text. Where modern productions might use projections to suggest scenery or movement, they used swathes of silk, which could have been effective, but somehow just wasn’t. Some of the costumes were gorgeous, but some looked like something your Mum might run up the day before fancy dress day at primary school.
There was far too much action that looked like bad mime or interpretative dance, and the Incas’ accents were almost offensively ‘Meester, I breeeng you girls, yes?’.
It got better in the second part, but lots of people didn’t come back after the interval.
But some of the audience obviously loved it, judging by the applause at the end. The crowd was older than other audiences I’ve seen at the National, particularly for Travelex season shows.