Posts Tagged ‘film’

No he escrito aquí desde hace 2 meses. En el caso de que alguien estuviese preocupado no pasó nada, bueno, nada aparte de ser perezoso. Nada mas que la vida normal y cotidiana estaba ocurriendo y así que no merecía escribir.

Pues, en fin, tengo que practicar el idioma entonces intentaré escribir con un poco mas frecuencia y principalmente en castellano antes del inglés.

A pesar de vivir en un pais (es decir el pais) hispanohablante, como vivimos dos ingleses juntos no mejoramos muy rapido. Liz tiene sus clases de español, y tenemos también las películas, los comics y los amigos.

Cool animated Charlie Parker

Una película muy buena es Chico y Rita, la que vimos el sábado. Es una historia dulce y romantica con una banda sonora cojonuda. Hay muchas personas reales al fondo de los protagonistas, músicos de Cuba y Nueva York como Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk y Tito Puente, los dibujos quedaban increíbles. Tengo que decir, tenía algo en mi ojo al final.

Okay, so I haven’t  written anything here for a couple of months. Nothing bad happened, in case anyone worried, there just hasn’t been much going on that I felt merited a post. But I should really keep going at the old Spanish, So, I’ll try and write a little more often and in Spanish first… because, seeing as we’re a couple of English speakers living together we’re not necessarily improving as fast as we could. Liz has her Spanish classes and we’ve both got films, TV, comics and mates to help.

One film we saw recently which stood out was Chico and Rita, which we saw on Saturday. It’s a sweet, romantic story with a brilliant soundtrack. There were a lot of real people in amongst the protagonists, musicians from Cuba and New York like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Tito Puento. The artwork was fantastic and, I have to say, I had a little something in my eye at the end…

When Liz went off to work in Italy last year, people asked me how I was doing “living the life of Rodríguez” (the title of this post). This is what men left at home are called. It comes from the back end of the Franco era, and suggests a bloke, wife and kids on holiday for the traditional month or so, left at home, working. The sense is that Spanish men in the sixties were not exactly self sufficient when it came to home life. Now in my situation, it’s not quite the same; Liz is off working for a start, and I’m not incapable in the kitchen, but still…

Feos : not pretty

So once again I am living the life of Señor Rodríguez while Liz is working really rather hard.

Sr Rodriguez went to the cinema last night. I was going to see a French kids comedy (Little Nicholas) but when I got to the cinema I changed my mind and went for Spanish fare instead. I saw Que se mueran los feos (which could be translated as ‘Death to the ulgy’ although that sounds a bit harsh… ) it was the sort of lightweight comedy set in a rural village we’ve seen a million times in the UK (and Ireland) but it starred Javier Cámara (who I would watch in anything ever since seeing Torremolinos 73). He played Eliseo, the balding socially-inept lonely fortysomething with a limp who longs for a partner but knows he’ll never have one and he actually brought a little depth to what could have been a terribly one dimensional character (I wouldn’t say it was complex and two dimensional, maybe one and a half dimensions). The rest of the cast I recognised by sight, if not by name, because they’re all on TV a lot, in fact one review I read said it was like watching an episode of Aida (a rather popular comedy series). That’s not a bad thing in my book.

I was chatting to a student today about a movie, the English title was:

some chap looking at a goat

The men who stare at goats.

We had both noticed that the Spanish poster was a little different.

Los hombres que miraban fijamente a las cabras.

Fair enough, stare is mirar fijamente (look fixedly)… but what caught my eye, and led my student to ask about it, was the tag line.

Sin cabras no hay gloria.

No goats no glory, which, as she said, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever until you explain the whole guts/goats thing.

Aerial View Of Vatican City Originally uploaded by plemeljr.

There are two multiplexes in Oviedo, one within walking distance, the other needs a bus, and an awareness of the finish time of the film (or a bus and taxi). They both show pretty much the same programme, which doesn’t include anything not in Spanish. They’re not big on V.O. releases here, apparently there is a cinema in Gijon which does them sometimes…

We don’t let that stop us though… I still like going to the cinema once a week or so. I was tempted to go and see ‘Let the right one in’ the other day but I reckon I’ll wait and see it in an original version with subtitles… some films just need to be seen with the original performances because, despite the skill of the dubbers, something is lost when you see dubbed films.

I saw Star Trek last week, and it was fine… they included Chekov’s difficulty with his w’s but Scotty! By all accounts Simon Pegg’s accent was geographically diverse but all I got was some slightly differently accented Spanish (I still can’t really tell accents apart, some of the South American ones yes).

Yesterday I went to the cinema intending to see something worthy but there wasn’t anything like that on (until 11pm… and I wasn’t going to hang around) so I did Angeles y Demonios. Which, as the Kermode said (I listened to the podcast this morning) is the stupidest film for a very long time. I was waiting for the equivalent of the ‘Get me to a library, now.’ line from the DaVinci rubbish and sure enough… with a straight face and daft hair Tom Hanks said ‘I need a map of Rome with all of the churches on, now.’

The exposition was a little hard to follow and the wayward Northern Irish by way of Tasmania accent from Ewan McGregor was utterly lost (apparently no big loss there) but the last half hour was laugh out loud utterly stupid. I had low expectations and they failed to be met by some considerable degree. The additional effort required to keep up in another language made it bearable… in English I’m pretty sure I would have been throwing things at the screen.

Find the path Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

While Oscar season is proceeding apace, last night saw the Spanish equivalent, the Goyas. I only heard the results this morning on the radio and it seems that the only one of the contenders that I saw won all the main prizes. It was called ‘Camino’ which can mean way or path (with an additional sense of pilgrimage, like in the Camino de Santiago). It was a well made film, and a bit controversial here.

It opens with a deathbed scene, a young girl is dying and her hospital room is filled with and surrounded by priests, nuns and praying medical staff. Then we’re off into flashback mode for most of the rest of the film where we see how the priests have come to believe that this girl is on the path to sainthood. She talks about Jesus with longing, she sees angels, she’s dying of cancer… The film shows us that one Jesus she talks about is a boy in her school, but the priests and nurses and nuns don’t know that… We see her visions but they are also explained as a symptom of cancer. At the end, her death becomes a big church affair and her family are pushed to the side as the priests strain to hear her last words. It’s apparently based on a true story. As I said, well made, but a little too polemical. Definitely worth seeing if it comes out in the UK.

In a lighter vein, we went to the cinema to see ‘Welcome to the North’ last night, which was a charming French comedy that has probably already been on in the UK. It was a good film to see dubbed, because a lot of the humour was related to the accent and peculiarities of the place. I’m not sure what Spanish accent they used to show the difference but it was probably something along the lines of Southerners doing Geordie….

Woody Allen in Spain Originally uploaded by IncogNEAToEmily.

We went to see Woody Allen’s new film (Vicky Christina Barcelona) last night, and I had forgotten that part of it was filmed in Oviedo (to be honest, not much more than a couple of scenes of Scarlett Johanssen and Javier Bardem lounging against some orange stone that could have been anywhere, and a few scenes from near the market, and a couple more from the coast. Where was the cider? Where were the bagpipes?). The eponymous Vicky and Christina are invited for a weekend to Oviedo and the initial reaction is ‘where?’ and the first reason given for not going was ‘nobody’s ever heard of Oviedo’. The packed audience chuckled at that one (it was packed becuase it was a bit dull and it was a bank holiday yesterday). The rest of the film was set in Barcelona, and it was quite good, but the characters were a bit cardboard, rich folk who don’t need to worry about anything but their relationships.

Still, the description of Oviedo as small and pretty was perfectly accurate. Just how small is illustrated by how often you bump into people you know. Yesterday, walking back from film we met one of my students out walking her dog. When you do meet someone in the street you’ve got two options. One is to stop and chat, this is the default setting for most people here, in fact, more than stop and chat, if you see someone and they haven’t seen you, you should shout, wave and generally make it impossible for them to miss you. If you truly haven’t got time then you greet someone with ‘goodbye’ and even then you might have to exchange a couple of words before you drift apart.

Okay, there’s a question. I went to see The Dark Knight at Oviedo’s IMAX screen, actually the smallest IMAX I’ve seen. I saw the film in the UK and wasn’t as impressed as the hype led me to believe I should be. However, watching it in Spanish, I wasn’t as annoyed by Batman’s distorted voice as in English, and I enjoyed the spectacle of it all a little more. I did have a couple of niggles though.

Batman’s riding his bike, no mudguards and cape flapping. There’s a massive wheel just behind him. Isadora Duncan time surely?

Harvey, Two Face, Dent speaks very clearly for a man with no lips and no cheek on one side of his face. You try saying anything at all with a P or an M while holding your lips apart… and where’s the constant leakage of saliva?

These are only issues because the rest of the film seems to have gone to such lengths to present a realistic world (albeit where there are caped crusaders and the like).

Oh and dancing? Well Isadora Duncan was a dancer, wore long silk scarves, in open top sports cars in the 20s. Silk scarf, spinning axle…

I don’t think it’s had a UK release yet but when it does Tropa de Elite is a must see. It’s a Brazillian police thriller, directed by the same chap who made Bus 174 (and if you haven’t seen that one yet it should go on whatever lists you keep of films to see, if you don’t do lists, start one now and put these two at the top, round them off with City of God and Carandiru for a four parter that will stop you ever wanting to visit Brazil, or at least the favelas). It’s got that handheld grittiness and the oppressive heat of good Brazilian cinema, the action is horrifyingly believable and the characters are more than the cardboard cut out good and evil that seems to infest Hollywood. The story follows a couple of police lieutenants, friends from childhood, who learn the hard way about police corruption before joining the BOPE, the elite police squad under the command of Captain Nacimiento. Nacimiento is looking for a replacement as he’s had enough, his wife is pregnant and he wants out.

The structure is nicely split up, with a long flashback after a kinetic opening sequence allowing for some aha moments as we realise where we are the second time. There’s a couple of heavily charged political scenes involving rich students who hate the police coming face to face with the anarchy they actually have. I fully expect this one to be in the list of Best Foreign pictures come oscar time…

I had some free time so I went to the flicks, not knowing what was on. I’ve seen the posters for El Incidente all over town last week so I picked that one. It’s another M Night Shyalaman affair. And it’s utterly daft. It starts in central park in New York and for some reason all the people in the park kill themselves. Not a drink-the-kool-aid kind of kill themselves but more a wooooo spoooky, look, they all stop walking and then they find gruesome ways to end it all. Okay, it’s an interesting start despite the flakey stop still, take two steps backwards pre suicide dance.

The first half of the film is like a live action itchy and scratchy cartoon only with suicides. The remainder is pokey fake science, led by Mark Walberg’s science teacher. He figures out what’s going on by erm, thinking reeeealllly hard, even though his mantra earlier on was observation, hypothesis, experiment, observation… which would have led to some fun scenes of him sending hapless bystanders into danger until he figured out why they died. Instead it came to him in a flash of inspiration and he and his rapidly dwindling band of survivors were saved.

It was an airborne thing, which for some reason is accompanied by a dangerous breeze… oooohhh so you can see it coming and run away (like the laughable ultra-cold in The Day After Tomorrow). Still, that wasn’t the worst thing about it. Even the ending wasn’t the worst thing, although it was pretty damn bad, the Incident just stops and the reason it happened is explained by a TV scientist a few months later as ‘one of those things in nature that we can’t explain’ WHAT! You couldn’t even come up with a better explanation than that? Don’t bother making the damn film until you can. That’s what writers are for. That’s as bad as, it’s all a dream.

The worst thing was the boom mic. Maybe I missed something in the dialogue, but in half the scenes the boom mic was hovering around clearly in view. At first I thought it was going to be some clever meta-film or something deliberate because, well it’s Mr shamalamadingdong and he does that sort of thing. Then as we got closer to the end I realised it was just plain rubbish film making. I wouldn’t be surprised to see in the credits Boom Operator (deceased) it was terrible. And who watched the dailies? Because they didn’t see it and it was soooooo obvious. It was even obvious to the ten teenagers who rather than watch the film, just talked all the way through it very loudly (that was the other thing I really didn’t like but I can’t blame MNS for that… or maybe I can, because if he had made a halfway gripping film they might have shut up).

By now I’ll have downloaded the Mark Kermode podcast from radio 5 and I’m hoping for some quality Kermodian rantage. If you haven’t hear’d any of his rants, the best are still available on the bbc website, and well worth listening to.

Magnet Haul-01 Originally uploaded by Airchinapilot.

So with time to kill in Barcelona, I went to the movies. Indiana Jones and the tediously long title… I wasn’t expecting greatness, I’ve seen some reviews and Anne hit the spot with her blog entry. But, but…. BUT oh my the physics…

Okay, first… lead lined fridge, great find Indy. Surviving that rolling around, bouncing, tumbling and stopping very quicky. I think he carries a full body airbag in his man purse.

And worse, and this had me laughing out loud. The crystal skull itself, it’s magnetic, it can attract iron filings (or gunpowder it seems) from a looooong way away. The best bit though is it only attracts metal objects when the special effects guys remember. So as soon as they pull their guns/swords/knives/dogtags away, the magnet forgets about them like a particularly stupid dog. And even worse John Hurt had a magic anti-magnetic blanket that blocked all of the magnetism when it covered the skull.

Of course, I may just have missed the explanation because the film was in Spanish… but I don’t think so. I’ll wait for Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics to notice.