You know, I honestly think I'm going to miss Germany more than Belgium. Seems strange but of course it's not strange at all, as Germany has been nothing but the scene of a series of pleasant holidays, undemanding, over-subsidized conferences and escapist weekends, all healthily soaked in reinheitsgebot beer. Whereas Belgium has been the scene of all of my travails and an embarassing abundance of incidences of alcohol poisoning as I kept refusing to understand the sugary, extremely strong beer was not intended to be drunk in the sort of quantities I'd previously considered satisfying. And we've been going to what is apparently one of the least charming bits of Germany at that - Dusseldorf - a sterile yuppie town, they say. Well, maybe considering how damn filthy Brussels is, the sterility was more welcome than it otherwise would have been.
We went to Dusseldorf last weekend - probably for the last time, as our friends there are likely to move to Brazil before the F-word and I can afford jaunts back to Europe, and when we make a jaunt back to Germany no doubt we'll prioritize and spend our time somewhere awesome like Berlin. That makes me a little sad. There are lots of nice things about yuppie towns, one of which is the fucking awesome international richness of their cuisine, and when those yuppie towns are in Germany there's the pleasant corollary of them not being overpriced. We had tapas and it was grand but we could have had any number of other things there and it would have been grand. Mind you the food in Berlin is fucking awesome too.
We also went to the track, which got old - I'd been expecting the vast and delicious buffets they offer in North American racetracks to keep the punters in - and we went to a couple of open air concerts in the Hofgarten, the memorable one of which was Oquestrada, a nice Portuguese band with a lot of flavours. You can listen here.
Not much else that's fit for print today. We saw Wolfman last night, a film I'd been excited about seeing. I know I don't read entertainment magazines or anything but I'm really shocked I hadn't heard about how bad it was. Not just garden variety bad, either, it was really atrocious. I've never borne witness to such a revolting waste of a big budget, fantastic acting talent, and concept, via an excruciatingly poor script and really indifferent direction. And what makes me angriest, I think, despite all the love I've got for Benecio del Toro, Hugo Weaving and good scripts, is the waste of a concept. I mean, fucking werewolves, they're awesome. And now that that turkey has came out and been all shitty, nobody's going to make another big-budget werewolf movie for a decade or two. Fuck.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Benecio del Toro. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Benecio del Toro. Mostra tutti i post
martedì, agosto 03, 2010
domenica, maggio 03, 2009
My favourite communist werewolf
My exam is tomorrow. After this weekend's sessions, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I fail, it'll be because I panic, because I know how to drive now. If I pass, I'll miss the guy guiding me. He finally taught me how to parallel park properly yesterday by launching into a stream of infuriated Gallic profanity when I just gently backed up crooked and hoped for the best for the 30th time. I'm becoming a hardened old wench and it seems like nothing but blistering fury can reach me any more. Anyways, now I know how to parallel park, and all the other little tricks. It will just be a question of staying tense enough at the exam to concentrate on what I'm doing, and not so tense that I start screaming 'AH, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO??????' when I enter the freeway.
Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.
This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.
Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.
Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.
This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.
Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.
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