Excellent film festival in London this year. It was my first one after all these years living here. I was spoiled when I lived in Toronto and went to TIFF every year. It was so accessible with so many tickets available at reasonable prices and I used to just rock up to the gala openings across the street from my apartment building and see pretty much every Hollywood A-lister.
The London Film Festival seemed to me a lot less promoted; at least I rarely saw any advertising or announcements or news on the telly until after the events occurred and celebs went home from the red carpet. Of course there's so much going on in this town at the same time...
Anyway, this year I received a big BFI brochure in the post on the day before tickets were available to priority members. So I went online and became a member of the British Film Institute and the next morning, I was able to get access and buy tickets to the screenings! I scoured the brochure the night before and knew which films to go after...too bad the Closing Gala, Great Expectations and a small film, Seven Psychopaths by the same guy who did In Bruges were already sold out! In less than half an hour! I chose a few films primarily because they looked the most interesting or they had good directors or they had good actors who may be showing up for the screening...and I was able to get tickets to some brilliant films and see some iconic individuals.
Here's a rundown:
Beasts of the Southern Wild is the first feature by American director Benh Zeitlin. It's a film with a bunch of non-actors that had received raves at both Sundance and Cannes. Well, the hype was right...in my opinion, it was brilliant! Beautifully shot, the superb, natural acting and the story narrated by the young girl kept me interested and made me care about the characters. Extremely engaging, gritty, very real, I loved all of the close ups of the crawfish, the pigs, the melting glaciers and especially the little girl. She's the most brilliant of all!
Next up was a new British feature called Broken with another unknown young actress. This film was also good and relentless with its 'in your face' dysfunctional and tragic families. The young female lead was extremely good and had some touching moments with her young beau as well as her father played by Tim Roth. He and Cillian Murphy, two of my favourite actors were excellent. It was a shame that they weren't at the screening.
The first tickets I was able to get were for Hyde Park on Hudson. I thought how fun it would be to see Bill Murray show up at the premiere and he did! And he was hilarious! The film was good too and I'm glad I saw it as it's a film that I wouldn't typically see in the cinema. Bill was great as FDR and Laura Linney was excellent as his distant cousin/lover....she's always good though and always chooses the most interesting roles. Samuel West was great as the young King George. I laughed out loud in certain areas; the script was quite funny.
And finally, the ultimate climax of the Festival for me was the premiere of Crossfire Hurricane, the new documentary of the Rolling Stones to celebrate their 50th anniversary. That's right, 50 years of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll! And they live to tell about it. The film is very honest and open and hilarious in many parts and so much fun to see. But the best part was seeing and almost touching Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ronnie and Bill as they walked by me along the aisle to get to the stage and introduce their film. It was fantastic and an absolutely unforgettable experience!
Friday, 26 October 2012
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Four Minutes or more of lost time
After an extremely hectic, relentless few weeks of work, both here and abroad, I returned home on a chilly, dark and damp London morning. The Olympic summer is truly over. No more joyous spirit and glorious sunshine and happy people. Everyone is back to black and grumpy.
We pulled up to Victoria station and I finally got a decent signal so I started to check my emails and Facebook and messages. Oh, I have a voicemail. Voicemail? And it's four minutes long...well, 3 minutes 59 seconds to be exact. Strange, it's from a friend with whom I just had dinner the other night. The message was garbled and hardly audible but I was able to make out some conversation. He wasn't speaking to me or leaving a message. He was speaking with another friend and some of it was about me! What are they saying? Oh, I wish I had better hearing! I'm thinking I need to get this to a CSI lab stat so they can split and assess all the voices and remove the background noise like the traffic, the car...yep I used to be a huge CSI fan, Vegas mostly.
Oh dear, the evening slowly comes back to me. I check my phone and look at recent history. Missed call at 12:14am. Must've been the voicemail. But I didn't receive my voicemails until I reached London. Uh oh, I called him at 12:19 that was 8 seconds long. I received a text at 12:20. I cannot repeat what it said! I made another call but aborted at 12:20. Why did I call again at 12:21 for one minute? What did I say? I called again and aborted at 12:34??!!
Oh boy, incoming call at 12:38 and it lasted six whole minutes. Hmmm....try to remember...try to remember...try to remember! What little I do remember is not very flattering...I may have been blubbering...and I certainly cannot remember six minutes of conversation! Ayyyyy!
Dinner was so much fun, lots of laughs and great wine and great food. We hadn't seen each other in many years but it was like it was just yesterday. Constant conversation, lots of teasing and some debate...it did get heated at some point in the evening...something about men and women and what's attractive and reverse discrimination and I believe I called him a sexist. And he agreed with me, then accused me of participating in a gender war...like I said it was heated about a topic we both were obviously passionate about. I suppose there was some sexual tension but I thought it was just hilarious! My other friend would then throw a zinger into the conversation whenever things died down and we went at it again. She said it was fun and I remember she even sided with him on one occasion which incensed me even more!
Alright, another text at the same time 12:38! How is that possible if we were on the phone talking? That text was more direct with specific instructions for rendezvous. Hey, aren't we friends? Don't worry, no Harry met Sally references. It's more like Friends with Benefits. Didn't even see that film...
Then I passed out. I know I did. Because I woke up at 2am fully dressed on top of all the covers in my hotel room. Excellent. I remember that much. That's good I guess...
Note to self:
Pink champagne and red wine are a reasonable combination when taken with a very nice meal of multiple lovely courses, but do not add lethal cucumber mint martinis concocted by an enterprising bartender called Elvis who wants to add his inventions onto the bar menu. Damn they were really good.
We pulled up to Victoria station and I finally got a decent signal so I started to check my emails and Facebook and messages. Oh, I have a voicemail. Voicemail? And it's four minutes long...well, 3 minutes 59 seconds to be exact. Strange, it's from a friend with whom I just had dinner the other night. The message was garbled and hardly audible but I was able to make out some conversation. He wasn't speaking to me or leaving a message. He was speaking with another friend and some of it was about me! What are they saying? Oh, I wish I had better hearing! I'm thinking I need to get this to a CSI lab stat so they can split and assess all the voices and remove the background noise like the traffic, the car...yep I used to be a huge CSI fan, Vegas mostly.
Oh dear, the evening slowly comes back to me. I check my phone and look at recent history. Missed call at 12:14am. Must've been the voicemail. But I didn't receive my voicemails until I reached London. Uh oh, I called him at 12:19 that was 8 seconds long. I received a text at 12:20. I cannot repeat what it said! I made another call but aborted at 12:20. Why did I call again at 12:21 for one minute? What did I say? I called again and aborted at 12:34??!!
Oh boy, incoming call at 12:38 and it lasted six whole minutes. Hmmm....try to remember...try to remember...try to remember! What little I do remember is not very flattering...I may have been blubbering...and I certainly cannot remember six minutes of conversation! Ayyyyy!
Dinner was so much fun, lots of laughs and great wine and great food. We hadn't seen each other in many years but it was like it was just yesterday. Constant conversation, lots of teasing and some debate...it did get heated at some point in the evening...something about men and women and what's attractive and reverse discrimination and I believe I called him a sexist. And he agreed with me, then accused me of participating in a gender war...like I said it was heated about a topic we both were obviously passionate about. I suppose there was some sexual tension but I thought it was just hilarious! My other friend would then throw a zinger into the conversation whenever things died down and we went at it again. She said it was fun and I remember she even sided with him on one occasion which incensed me even more!
Alright, another text at the same time 12:38! How is that possible if we were on the phone talking? That text was more direct with specific instructions for rendezvous. Hey, aren't we friends? Don't worry, no Harry met Sally references. It's more like Friends with Benefits. Didn't even see that film...
Then I passed out. I know I did. Because I woke up at 2am fully dressed on top of all the covers in my hotel room. Excellent. I remember that much. That's good I guess...
Note to self:
Pink champagne and red wine are a reasonable combination when taken with a very nice meal of multiple lovely courses, but do not add lethal cucumber mint martinis concocted by an enterprising bartender called Elvis who wants to add his inventions onto the bar menu. Damn they were really good.
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