Museum Hours

So another London Film Festival is over. Even if this one didn't seem a vintage edition, for me at least, the experience was as enjoyable as ever and there were still some spectacularly good films on offer. Here's what I made of the ones I saw through the medium of immediate tweets with the usual scoring out of 10 .... Score 9 The Keeping Room   #TheKeepingRoom #LFF Wow! Incredibly powerful, genre bending Civil War feminist revenge western. Going to be hearing distant hooves for days — Kevin Lloyd (@KevinELloyd) October 12, 2014 Far From Men Slightly star struck at the profound, tense and beautiful #FarFromMen #LFF a quite wonderful and humane film pic.twitter.com/kir2SYd7cV — Kevin Lloyd (@KevinELloyd) October 18, 2014 Score 8 The Falling   Repression, neuroses and hysteria abound to great effect in #thefalling #LFF with a completely and infectiously enthused director — Kevin Lloyd (@KevinELloyd) October 11, 2014 If I ever open a cafe i...

I'm not sure I could answer the question posed in the title to this blog any better having seen this film. Indeed I suspect it is one of those questions about which only someone on their third joint and attending the kind of conference at which this film is set would even muse. However, anyone prepared to give up 90 minutes of their time should be well rewarded and gently amused by this brilliantly conceived and realised piece - a saline drip of droll humour on very slow release. The development in the early 1980s of chess programmes capable of competing against real people is used as a starting point for all sorts amusing insights and hallucinations. Indeed the film is as much concerned with hallucinations as anything else. A number of the characters see these as having almost permanent effects and there is a bravura sequence involving a machine increasingly seeming to question the programmer rather than the other way round which finishes with a glimpse of an embryo 'i...

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 sa...

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 ...

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 ...

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 t...