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Top Ten Films Of The Year

An annual requirement and this year easier than has often been the case. So here is my list with a very short and often specific explanation of just why ... 1.  Blue Is The Warmest Colour  simply the most wonderful piece of film making, 3 hours slips by in a flash, you want another 3 hours and then more but there are also bravura pieces of directing which are breathtaking. For me the sequence when the two main characters are first sitting on the bench which recurs as a setting throughout the film is astonishing. They move closer and closer together in real time but time is simultaneously suspended. Heart stopping. 2.  The Great Beauty  provides yet more swoon inducing cinematography and a main character who is fascinating as much in what he doesn't say as what he does; an increasingly acute and self-reflective observer of a world gone mad as the privileged pursue their obsessions and ignore the rest. 3.  Museum Hours  on which I have already said my piece  ... 4. 

Liz Vernon: 16th Century Metalhead?

As regular readers will appreciate, this blog eschews the portentous, self important or indeed sententious in favour of scholarship worn so lightly as to take flight, or indeed fright, in the slightest breeze. So it is to be hoped that, on this occasion, they will allow a departure onto more serious terrain given the potentially ground breaking work undertaken by this blog over many minutes which seeks to follow humbly in the revisionist footsteps that writers on art history of the stamp of Dan Brown have developed in recent years. The point of departure for what can, sadly, only be the merest apercu is a picture currently to be seen hanging innocently in the back room of this  exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery . The subject is Elizabeth Vernon, the Countess of Southampton at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I but to distinguish her from the monarch we shall hereafter call her 'Liz' which we feel is also more in keeping with the style to which she aspired and of

Shunga: Not Setting The House On Fire

One of the more interesting aspects of this  exhibition  at the British Museum of the Japanese erotic art form generically called shunga, is the rather peculiar notion that shunga calligraphy and script was considered to be capable of protecting your house from catching fire. Whilst that would be a clear benefit in 18th century Japan, it is less welcome in the context of a show in which something catching fire would frankly be a blessing. I'm quite surprised at how positively this exhibition has been reviewed, including in my own  newspaper of choice . It just seems to me be rather relentless; just how many drawings of various exaggerated and/or energetic activity can you take before it all becomes, well, just a bit dull? Afficionados and art historians would certainly argue that shunga occupies a space with which the West has always struggled, hovering between art and pornography.  However, if looked at in terms of the latter, this show rather reinforces the sense that

Museum Hours

A new blog which fittingly has a first post about the  film  which provided the inspiration; a quite wonderful, wry look at a few days in the life of a museum attendant in Vienna. There have presumably been easier pitches in the history of cinema but we should be deeply grateful that this gently subversive piece made it through. For this is a film that shouts quietly. About the way that we all too easily jump to conclusions about people based on what they look like and what they do; indeed how in a gallery we ignore or look down on the watchers without reflecting that they may be rather more acute in their observation of us. Our attendant relatively early lets slip that he spent much of his former life on the road with rock groups and in one particularly droll moment slightly hesitantly announces to an amused Mary Margaret O'Hara that he does still like heavy metal whilst looking as though he would be considerably more likely to put on a CD of Mantovani. About the way that w