WATCHED - On Awe Of Beauty - A Reflection on Life Video.

This is such a moving video, of a woman who has such a tender sense of both the beauty and the fragility of her life. Born in part out of the loss of her young son. She talks about starting a gratitude journal in order to appreciate her life more, and the need in later life to prioritise what you focus your attention and love upon. So, needless to say, it spoke to me.

WATCHED - Watcher

In our Upper Sheringham household we are having a spontaneous Miaka Munroe film season. Having seen her in the films Longlegs, then Tau, and this bleakly filmed wonder Watcher all within a week of each other.

Munroe plays a woman Julia who comes to Bucharest because her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) has a new job taking him home to Romania. She feels like a spare part. With little to do but wander the streets and lounge around the flat, she stares out of its wide picture windows. Opposite is a grey rain stained apartment block, where she notices a figure always standing seemingly looking at her. Her husband treats her fear of being watched, as if this were an entirely female neurosis best not given much credence. But there is a serial killer out there, who is decapitating their victims. So is it not unreasonable for her to be fearful?

There is not a huge amount of dialogue in this film. You are frequently shown only Munroe's face and it's growing unease and distress. This imagery is surrounded by a soundtrack acoustic that amplifies any trace of ambient sound around her, with a consequent heightening effect of something ill defined and sinister broaching. The most static of camera shots will be panning in or zooming out, ever so slowly. Building tension into apparently the most innocent of scenes. The director, Chloe Okuno, skilfully composes these taught frightening senario out of such very simple elements. Sparseness in this movie is it's most effectively utilised quality.

Munroe's ability to dial down her acting, as was most evident in Longlegs, means when she does break into a fury, when her husband admits he can no longer indulge in believing her, it is all the more alarming. Burn Gorman as the killer, finally gets to play a full on twisted murderer, rather than the nerdy or neurotic genius scientist. 

The Watcher is a masterclass in how to subtly create unease and suspense. It also beautifully exploits that classic wavering uncertainty of - is she mad, deluded or really being persued by a mass murderer? Compelling stuff. I highly recommend this. It's a cut above some of the so called 'smart' horror movies around.

CARROT REVIEW  - 7/8

Available to stream on Netflix

MY OWN WALKING - 2nd Journal November 2024

Along with better health and mobility, comes a more changeable mood. I have recently had moments of despondency, and the unhelpful dwelling on thereof. This has reoccurred in the last few weeks since the information about being pre-diabetic. On the surface a relatively minor thing, but it's somehow got to me in a way the HA! never did. Is there anything else where my body is out of whack I need to know about? I'm tired with cossetting my body into behaving better, like its this petulant self destructive child.

Though I can, and do, respond in positive ways, making lifestyle and dietary changes, these do not alter the fact that this body of mine's health and functioning has deteriorated. And that deterioration, in the longer term, I can can do very very little about. It goes with the territory of being mortal. So am I just indulging in feeling helplessly morose about all this? Is this self pitying worth the time that I give it? Or is it that the whole subject of our own demise is something we must allow ourselves to be in touch with and allow ourselves to grieve for.

A deeper recognition of the finite nature of life, has made time and what I do with it, feel increasingly a valuable priceless thing. One not to be squandered, wasted on fripperies, or focused on things that seem neither important nor life enhancing. What to make of my retirement, of the time I have left before I no longer have the capacity to care one way or another? It appears the more anxious and tightly I hold on to counting the beats of time, the more life itself slips through these expectant fingers of mine. 

When another day passes without achieving much, with little but the practicalities of my health dealt with. I question myself whether I'm making the most of my days. My mood becomes bleaker and more overshadowed. Indeed, there ought to be more time for artistic endeavours, but that seems to either fritter itself away in my hands or find I'm never in the mood for it. Despite the best laid plans. I have to acknowledge, it has forever been thus. I've often been found running scared of my own artistic self expression.

It may be beneficial to reflect on how things are, or have been. Though if you are looking positively forward, however provisionally, at some point you need to act, to make changes, or life will only serve up more of the same. Things feel worse because of all the perceived dilly dallying. As soon as I actually put ideas to paper, any mood or trough of despond immediately lifts.

Looking back at life, I catch the drift of its achievements, it's joys, its best bits, its mistakes, its missed opportunities, the significant ommissions. Why did I do that and not this? I inherited through my upbringing a primarily practical focus to life. To deal with these before anything else, be self motivated, keep yourself afloat. If I have any regrets it's that I often let practical considerations continually overrule the more spontaneous artistic desires for self expression I had. I repeatedly let that part of my character down. Quite often because I felt the risk, I felt scared of failure, of the bottom being knocked out of my misplaced confidence.

Not providing creative urges with sufficient time or expression, is a type of self betrayal. In those moment of despondency I'm put in touch with the rubbed raw emotional cost of that. Though it bears the bruises, self betrayal will always hit back. After all, it's been kept isolated in a locked room for months on end, its in a stroppy mood. How else could it respond? Wouldn't you be depressed?

Without an artistic project on the go of some sort I do overtime become like a dried out leaf, curled up and brittle. My soul shriveling up inside. That I am only partially retired, has its benefits and it's demerits with regard to keeping busy and engaged. There is theoretically more time for artistic pursuits, but it is just as easy to let my days be consumed by the practical day to day concerns as it was when I worked full time. The demands of the intray that never quite gets empty enough for artistic self expression to find space.

I used to think when I retired then there would be all time in the world. Then I could devote time to all the things I love doing but rarely found the time for. Say not so sir. Retirement is not a time to reinvent yourself in, but to be more generously kind towards what has become hardwired in you, there are always limits, there are still external constraints. The range of what is possible, may no longer have the breadth and scope of ones youth. But, nonetheless, you work with whatever you find there is. And there is also the need to pare back what you expect yourself to do. Without the constraints of daily work there really should be time for being more fully soulful.

I find the need to step back, to hold even creativity lightly. If I want it to be always stunningly successful then I have not understand the territory I am in. You have to be open to it failing to launch, to create an absolute mess. Sometimes the creative ideas you have will be rubbish ones, and this will be revealed only at the precise moment you put paint to paper. One's artistic imagination is a beautifully pure thing only when its left unsullied by contact with the reality of expression. Creativity at its best, is to enjoy the encounters with the unexpected surprises and modes of expression. To take all the delight you can in giving them an earthly form. Withholding from engaging with this, has never been a choice that has ever been consequence free. You just have to do it and find out if it will float or sink this time. Its a rare artist who doesn't have a phase where everything turns out crap. And if they say they don't, then check their dustbins or fire grates..

Whilst I say this to myself, and oh how drearily familiar it all is, I often wonder whether I'm really listening. In the past, these difficult conflicted turbulence's in my responses to being creative, led to a view that maybe it would be better for all concerned if I left them entirely alone. Not touch them with a barge pole. That perhaps I'd be more content with myself and life, if I never allowed my imagination to go anywhere near being expressed. It was as though by refraining from touching an old sore, it all would heal up. Such are the sort of delusions I've sometimes chosen to live by.

FINISHED READING - Dead End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto

Dead End Memories is a group of short stories which on the surface appear to have no linking theme. But once you are engrossed in the world Yoshimoto conjures, there are clearly repeated tones of regret, lost love, betrayal and relationships that literally do come to a dead end.

There is the ongoing search for a compatible love. Unresolved or unfound love that can have no closure. Love of a person who once seemed ideal, who's now proved themselves clumsily, cruelly fallable. Some times love reaches a dead end, and yet though dead, the relationship lingers on in an emotionally tricky inability to disentangle the good from the bad memories.

The opening story has a man who lives in the house of his grandparents, though they continue to exist there as mute ghosts. The dead couple are the spectral embodiment of a Japanese romantic ideal. One the young lovers initially react against. Each feels the obligation to continue with the family business. Do they break away or go with the momentum of that legacy?

There is a simple beauty in all these stories. Sometimes wistful, sometimes more aggrieved. The titular story Dead End Memories finds a woman talking about her relationship with Takanashi. A relationship that slowly evaporates without her ever realising it was finished. There's a lot of unresolved business that she tries to process through her conversations with Nishiyama, who she works with. There is admiration between these two, and the hint of more should they both wish to persue it.

Yoshimoto's signature themes of the difficulty of finding and keeping love, of things left unsaid, all are here given poignant focus in her uniquely sparse yet touchingly effective writing style.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

SCREEN SHOT - Rebel Moon Parts 1 & 2

It begins in a simple homestead village on the moon Veldt. Looking like somewhere between 1930's Kansas and Tolkien's Shire. Nasty men in tyrannically tight boots turn up in a spaceship, demanding a percentage of the villages corn. Kora, who has lived in the village for two years, unbeknownst to the villagers can kick ass with the best of them. Along with Gunner from the village she sets off to put together an elite team. One that can defend the village from the authoritarian space gents in neat uniforms.

This is a not an unfamiliar story line, essentially a direct steal from Kurosawa's epic Seven Samurai. Throw in the gothic steam punk styling of David Lynch's Dune, the throbbing blazing swords of Star Wars via Chinese martial arts and there you have it. A veritable smorgasbord of references to chew on. and find hard to digest.

Zack Snyder never knowingly under cooks his films. So Part One clocks in at two hours, with a three hour Directors Cut if you could bare it. Part Two is two hours, or two and a half when uncut. The thing is longer is not what you really needed here. Snyder appears to not understand less can be more. Because in his book, more requires MORE but with huge roaring exclamation marks MORE!!!!  What happens in the directors cuts? There is just grotesque amounts of bloody violence, and if there is a suggestion of a sexual encounter in the cut version, in the uncut it gets explicitly raunchy, apparently. So he didn't edit out the subtle more nuanced bits after all.

As it stands Part One just about holds its own as a film. It's quite a passable, if very derivative, science fiction romp. Part Two could realistically be over in an hour and a half. But it decides to luxuriate in its first hour with scenes of folksy tweeness and soul searching. Followed by an hours worth of the battle for the village which just goes on and on and on and on. The thing is, that the battle is directed at only one pace, which is intensely furious, so after half an hour you are utterly exhausted with it. You remove your active emotional engagement and endure its constant overreaching for meaning with a stoical heart. Light and shade here is a basic description of a lamp stand. 

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

WATCHED - Grounded In Realness - A Reflections on Life Video

I recent came across this, I think South African based film makers Justine and Micheal. They run a video company called Reflections on Life. They edit fifteen to twenty minute vignettes, that each presents an insight into an alternative lifestyle or the thoughts of a person who has a particularly unique or notably thoughtful outlook on life. I have found many of them have spoken to me deeply, which I've really appreciated. I'm going to repost a short selection of them here. But you can find a whole lot more on their You Tube site.

This one, Grounded In Realness, features a guy who found during Covid lockdown that he loved the simpler life it brought him, that he has made a huge effort to continue its more contemplative slower paced nature afterwards.

WATCHED - Then I Will Kill You

We binge watched the four episodes of Then I Will Kill You on ITVX in one evening. I don't necessarily recommend that, as it is a tough watch. But this is the sort of drama where once you're launched into it you really do have to see it through. So be prepared. That this is based on a true story is deeply shocking. What one woman is put through first by her psycopathic partner and then by the insensitivity and inept handling of the criminal justice system. Well, that beggars belief.

Delia Barmer is a self confessed ' free spirit'. Independently minded, who loves travelling. She lives her life how she wants, she speaks her mind plainly. She comes across as a bit of an odd ball, that others tend to ridicule or snigger at. But underneath it all she has kind caring instincts.

In a pub, after work one evening, she meets John Sweeney for the first time. For a while their relationship progresses well. She asks him to move in with her. Over the four years they are together, it becomes clear Sweeney is not entirely right in the head. And this only gets worse when, out of sheer exasperation, she asks him repeatedly to move out. I won't detail how he responds, just watch the first two episodes it's all there.

Delia Barmer, as played by Anna Maxwell Martin is a complex individual, not always likeable, but always relatable. It's a powerhouse of a performance, for which I would not be at all surprised if awards come her way. Ably supported by Shaun Evans as John Sweeney, the initially charming rogue, with a dark side. With few hints where his twisted pathology comes from. Something previously has fucked him up mentally, we know not what.

The second half of Then I Will Kill You takes you into the criminal justice system. One that Delia is forced to comply with, but repeatedly fails her. She does not want to play the victim, she just wants justice and then to be allowed to move on. Her endurance of how the system then treats her and catastrophically fails her, is if anything more painful to watch. A compelling gutsy piece of drama, that leaves you dwelling on it afterwards.

CARROT REVIEW  -8/8

SCREEN SHOT - Shadow in the Cloud

Shadow in the Cloud is a late World War 2 drama set around the Japanese conflict. It crow bars into it the idea of real gremlins sabotaging the airforce. It is clearly conceived as a vehicle for Chloe Grace Moretz, who ably holds the thing together emotionally and in its action sequences.

It's another example of contemporary film making that attempts to turn the tables on your expectations of what a female led drama can be. Whereas war films would once have beeen well written with heroically competent male characters with the female parts, if there are any at all, grossly underwritten clichés, mere ciphers of femininity. This film lazily swaps those gender tropes around, with a heroically competent central female character surrounded by a group of thinly written masculine caricatures. Male bimbos all, who are hopelessly inadequate.This makes it just as insulting and untruthful as it's misogynistic predecessors.

Despite it being tautly filmed and well acted, the essential incongruity of its essential premises drags it down. It's also unable to really get behind the many things it appears to want to be. Is it a World War 2 drama, a feminist subversion of role expectations or a comic book war fantasy?  Never entirely succeeding in being any of them.

All of which feels a bit of a shame, as Moretz does more than demonstrate she has the acting chops to hold this patently ludicrous film scenario together. Let's hope no one thinks this worthy of a sequel. But as it was produced by the Fast & Furious franchise, that maybe a faint hope.

CARROT REVIEW  - 3/8

FINISHED READING - Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin

As much as you might greatly admire a writer and their work, this doesn't mean everything they've ever written is brilliant, nor essential reading. This is particularly so when the book you are reading is a publisher's edited compilation of essays, short stories, articles, public talks and incomplete ruminations. The sense that they are mopping up the tad ends of their stash of Le Guin's output cannot be avoided.

Much of what is contained within Space Crone tells you little that appears fresh or enlightening, in the sense of blowing the dust of a topic. The short stories are largely insubstantial ones. The essays, articles and talks are mostly explorations of the differing constraints, biases and prejudices at play in science fiction, in the assessment of women writers. That a lot of these issues still feel prescient is a statement in itself. Though I could not escape the feeing that some were quite dated in content or style. Mainly because the arguements, though true, are now well trodden ones and have not been that effective.. Though these do chronicle Le Guin's own contribution and exploration of the pressures and prejudices applied to, or felt by, female writers. Cutting edge feminism these no longer are.

Another thing these post death assembled books cannot escape is the lack of a clear overarching theme to link them together. Due entirely to them never being never thought of as likely bedmates. So the subject matter and accompanying tonal shifts here can be jarring. Even though they have the mind and imagination of Le Guin in common, they were conceived to be read or heard in widely different contexts. How you speak upon any subject matter can vary depending who you are speaking too. Talks are delivered to specific gatherings of people, for whom the talk was formed to be heard by, and hence with a distinct purpose in mind.

 

So, this book was a disappointment. I became particularly vexed by my desire to skip things, which gathered in intensity and pace as I progressed.

CARROT REVIEW  - 2/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 120 - Circular Confections

I had been writing a review of a rather superb production of Hedda Gabler streamed on National Theatre At Home. I spent many a tricky minute correcting and recorrecting the auto correct. Schooling it until it got the message that when I typed Hedda I didn't  mean to say Headache.

It's a sign of how my health is generally improving since the HA! that, one fine weekend recently, we did the Wells to Holkham circular walk. All seven and a half miles of it, without my feeling strained or out of breath. It took around four hours. But it was helped by being broken down into four stages, with three places to stop, rest and replenish with food or drink. Walking on country paths is good for my hips. Mobility improved afterwards, even if they were a bit tender by completion.

Now I'm fully within the active interest of my local medical practice, I get requests to get this or that checked out. Blood tests to keep an eye on the condition my liver, deterioration of which is one possible side effect of a medication I take. But also to keep tabs on my health more generally. The most recent blood test threw me yet another health curve ball. I have now to consider myself to be prediabetic. Another dietery constraint to be deployed. Which is all a bit of a pisser. Diet, getting fitter and losing weight are the main ways of reversing out of a PD diagnosis. I hold out no hope on this, but we will play along with it. Until the death wish to 'let's just get it all over quicker shall we' kicks in.

Just before the HA! I finished making a wooden screen/windbreak for our back garden patio. It's a hulking great thing, too heavy to be moved solo for a man with my heart condition. So its laid there taking up all the bench space in my workshop. Whilst around it detritus accumulated and as a space its just got cluttered, then a mess. But this weekend Hubby and I finally moved it, and its I fixed it into position. It looks rather fine too. So that's one Spring project completed by late Autumn. Now I can start the tidying up and rearranging I'd planned.

The latest advert for porridge oats has the slightly odd tag line of :

'Not all oats taste like childhood'

Mmmmm the disgusting associations that brings to mind.

I appear to be having a medical check up of some sort nearly every week of late. This coming week its been the two yearly visit to the Optician. They have a short questionnaire to fill in beforehand. They wanted to know what medications I"m on, so I dutifully answered. However, when I typed in the name of the blood thinner - Rampiril - the auto correct immediately changed it into - Vampirism.

POEM - Seed

SEED

The returning seed of sycamore

twirls to the ground

a soul arriving via helicopter

fresh from the highest blue 

the conclave of heaven.

Written by Stephen Lumb
November 2024

WATCHED - Heddar Gabler

Hedda Gabler by Ibsen by the late 20th century had become one of theatres standard plays. Unlike many of its contemporaries, it centres around the life of a female character in fin de siecle Norway. A woman trapped in a world devised and maintained for the benefit of men. In the midst of which Hedda trys amd fails to obtain agency over her life. 

Hedda Gabler (Ruth Wilson) has a past, of being a much pursued 'catch'. She cleverly plays the field, with a succession of flawed or devious men, whilst avoiding committing to any of them. Hedda, comes from aristocratic stock, and would be high maintenance for anyone who finally marries her. For if she must eventually marry, she knows exactly what she materially wants out of it, to make life bearable. She naively thinks she will be able to play the game and make it work for her.

At the beginning of the play Hedda and her new husband Jurgen Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon. Terminally bored with him already, but he serves an ulterior purpose in keeping her more persistent old suitors amours at bay. What happens during the play is that this marriage reveals itself to be as much, if not more, of a prison. No deterrent for the advances of Judge Brack (a serpent like Rafe Spall) a man for whom coercive control is a primary mode of operation.

This adaption is written and updated with great skill by Patrick Marber, and directed with modernist starkness by Ivo van Hove. The staging is this huge space of a sparsely furnished modern apartment, with bare plastered walls. The sense of unfinished business permeates the stage. Central to it is of course Ruth Wilson as Hedda, who is simply compelling to watch how she flips from forced bonhomie to, strident independence of spirit, to a lost melancholy, usually accompanied by Joni Mitchell's Blue. You know this is not going to end well for her, but still you hope even as the odds become increasingly stacked against her, that maybe this situation could turn around. A totally phenomenal production.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8. 

Currently available to stream on National Theatre at Home.

LISTENING TO - As Fast As I Can Go by One True Pairing

Its a rare release that captures your imagination as much as this one has done mine. Tom Fleming aka One True Pairing has, it must be said had a bit of a personal struggle going on in recent years. That he has filtered and processed through his music. Still in possession of that beautiful silky husk of a deep toned voice that made him so compelling to listen to when he was in the Wild Beasts.

As soon as I heard this track As Fast As I Can Go, I was won over. Produced by John'Spud'Murphy who has garnered many accolades, producing in recent years Lankum, Oxn and Black Midi. So he has a pedigree amongst cutting edge folk and indie, and its a brilliant one. Plus Tom Fleming has a talented range of musicians working with him such as members of Lankum.and Percolator. The opening of the song is all banging sticks and struck bits of metal and bells, that then builds to a propulsive drum rhythm, which I for one find completely intoxicating and a thrill to listen to. Who would have guessed so near to the end of 2024 I'd find one of my favouite tracks of the year.