Category: Films

Dreams of a Life, Weekend

On By Laura MorganIn Films

My last cinema visit of 2011 and first of 2012 were to see two films which are completely different in theory but which each left me with a similar set of feelings. If you haven’t seen either or both of them I won’t spoil them here (not that either film is the kind you can spoil, really), but I suggest that you stop reading NOW and go to the cinema to watch one or ideally both of them.

Dreams of a Life is the true (or “true”; the impossibility of arriving at an independent truth about another person being one of its central themes) story of Joyce Vincent, a young Londoner who died alone in her flat in Wood Green in 2003 and wasn’t discovered for three years. If that sounds harrowing, it is, but it’s also fascinating, and touching, and thoughtful, and ultimately life-affirming, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms. What happened to Joyce was shocking, of course, but the film is as much about her life and love and friendships as about her death, and I came away with what felt like an intimate and tender portrait of someone quite a lot like you or me. It’s not like any other film I can think of, and I think it will stay with me for a long time.

Weekend is a love story – a romance in every sense, although again, it felt very close to home. Watching it, I thought – I know these people; I’ve been to these places. There is, I think, something very English about both films, which is part of what makes them feel so familiar. But you don’t have to be English, or live here, to recognise something fundamental in each of them, because they are about real people with real uncertainties and doubts and secrets, and both make the point that you can never really know another person’s secret. And they treat that truth with an honesty that makes both films seem very grown-up, in the best sense of the term. They are both made by people I’d like to know in real life, which is praise I’ve never used about a film before, not counting Woody Allen films (and people get cross when I say I’d like to know Woody Allen in real life, so I tend not to say it any more, even though it’s true).

There are no neatly wrapped-up endings to either film and both contain a lot of sadness, but I came away from them both feeling uplifted, perhaps because both stories are also about happiness, albeit transitory happiness (which is the only real kind, because if you were happy all the time you wouldn’t know you were happy, so it wouldn’t count).

Weekend has left most cinemas now, but you can probably still catch Dreams of a Life if you hurry. But they are also both the sort of film which would work just as well on TV, so one way or another, I hope you will get to see them.

Next up on my to-watch list: The Artist, about which I am ridiculously excited.

You dreamed about the same creep I did!*

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Navel gazing1 Comment

Me and my brother and sister have a game. It’s called “In… what… waaaay” in honour of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, although it doesn’t really deserve a name of its own, because it’s just “guess the movie I’m quoting”. But we’ve seen all of the same movies, so it’s more fun to play than it would be with random strangers.

Anyway, there are some films, Ferris among them, which almost aren’t worth using any more because we all know them so well, which means that if you can come up with a line from one of those films which the other two don’t immediately recognise, you are definitely the winner of that round.

In a separate development, I am really enjoying my new job. Really enjoying it. Put those two facts together and maybe it’s not that strange that last night I dreamed that my actual job was coming up with movie quotes for people to guess. As the alarm went off at seven o’clock this morning, I was gleefully reciting the line “that’s the bedroom…but nothing ever happened in there”* and waiting to see who’d guess it first. I can’t remember who was doing the guessing, but – as when we play it for real – it was all very jolly and uncompetitive.

I’m pleased that my brain chose to associate my new job with playing “In… what… waaaay”. I think it bodes well.

Some of my dreams are interesting and many are definitively not. The most interesting dream I’ve ever had, which I can still conjure up perfectly vividly even though I dreamed it in 1992, is a story for another day. The second-most interesting dream was a nightmare which still sends shivers down my spine, although it’s one of those nightmares which don’t sound scary at all when you describe them. I’ve never been able to interpret either of them in a way that made sense, so perhaps I will write about them here one day and see if someone else can do better.

In general, though, I’m not a very cryptic dreamer: most of what I dream about is a perfectly transparent reference to whatever I’ve mostly been thinking about that day. Here are three examples:

1. When I’d been at the Guardian about eighteen months, I was asked to take on a much more technical job than I’d ever done before. It was still project management, but it involved knowing about servers and back-end systems and other things I didn’t really understand. These were projects on which the website would literally stand or fall. In the days before I started, I dreamed that we were all riding in a giant bus, which was being driven jointly by our Chief Technical Officer and our Systems Administrator.  At a crucial moment,  they asked me to come forward and drive the bus. As I took over the steering wheel, I swerved it violently to one side and crashed the bus into the verge.

2. A couple of years later, I was helping  to run a survey of people’s favourite films by collecting lots of data and sending it to a friend, who was mashing it up and turning it into something interesting. Midway through, I dreamed that the friend in question was a private detective (in the dream he was also Sherlock Holmes, and I was Watson) and he’d called me into his office to help with an assignment. “I need you to gather some information”, he said. “I need you to go out and find every example you can of the anthromorphisation of letterboxes in nineteenth-century English literature.”

(I guess my subconscious added a flourish of its own there.)

3. Shortly after the beloved and I became engaged, I dreamed that we were in a large room full of people we knew, eating a meal. Our table was at one end of the room and we were facing out towards everybody else. Our chairs were eight or nine feet tall, and we’d had to climb ladders to reach them. As the meal ended I looked down and realised that the ladders had been removed, and we had to stay in the chairs, with everybody looking at us.

No need for Freud’s help in interpreting any of those, I don’t think.

(On the other hand, the period in my life when I had the liveliest and most colourful dreams was while I was reading On The Interpretation Of Dreams before I went to sleep every night, which is an activity I strongly recommend if you can’t afford hallucinogens.)

*They’re both easy, but please go ahead and guess the source of each quote in the comments. It will make me very happy.

Holiday time

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Music, Reasons to be cheerful

I’m accidentally got a Christmas head on me two months too early, having been to see a charming snowbound Norwegian film called Home For Christmas at the LFF this week, and it’s been exacerbated by my having just made the Christmas pudding. Now is about the right time to do it, but it puts me into the festive spirit too soon.

So I am remedying it with this summer song by Hildegard Knef, which raises my spirits in quite a different way. Enjoy.

The Oscars

On By Laura MorganIn Films2 Comments

I always think the Oscars are kind of a strange idea. I used to imagine annual awards for accountancy, say, or plumbing, and use them as an illustration of what why I thought the Oscars were kind of a strange idea, but there probably are annual awards for accountancy and plumbing these days, and what’s more they are probably televised, so my illustration no longer works. Nonetheless, I do think it’s weird to give prizes to people for doing their jobs, and for a self-appointed committee to decide what’s “best” in a competition which is limited in its scope and necessarily subjective. You might as well give a prize for the “best” marriage guidance counsellor, or the “best” GP.

But I don’t really care about any of that, because I like looking at the dresses, and while I can take or leave the ceremony itself, I do love the red carpet moments. Last night’s costume choices seemed to be dominated by an inexplicable preference for silver, grey and silvery-grey dresses that made the wearers look thin and pale and bosomless, but I suspect that’s a popular look in Hollywood all the year round. Three cheers, then, for Charlize Theron, who couldn’t look bad if she tried, but who I thought looked sensational in this dress, which walks the unsteady line between old-style glamour and Bjork-ish overindulgence, and gets it exactly right:

On TV it seemed pinker than it looks here, so the clash with the red lipstick was stronger. Those boob-roses are almost too much, but the old-fashioned shape of the rest of the dress and the elegant hair and lack of accessories bring the overall effect right back to understated glamour. She looks classy and interesting and hellasexy all at once.

My favourite red carpet interview was with that nice chap Colin Firth, who as far as I could tell in two hours of watching was the only nominee who, when pulled over for questioning by Ryan Seacrest, shuffled around to make some more space in front of the camera and included his wife in the interview. “And here’s Livia!”, he said brightly, as though she was the real star for whom they’d all been waiting. What a nice man, and how nice to see a couple who seemed not to have to make an effort to look as though they were enjoying each other’s company. And what a strange place Hollywood is.

The Infidel

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Reasons to be cheerful

Erratum: none of the below is true.

I took two weeks off between leaving my old job and starting my new one last summer, and in the gap I spent a day as an extra on a film set. The film is now finished, and although it’s not scheduled for release until April, a trailer was published today on the Guardian’s website. IIf you look very closely, you’ll spot me in the background of the bar mitzvah scene. Here is a still with an arrow pointing to the top of my head, in case you can’t find me:

(The film is about a Muslim who discovers that he’s adopted and is really a Jew. It has the potential to be horrible, but my film reviewer friend who’s seen it says that it’s quite good. Also that I am “clearly visible for several minutes”.)

Advent song for December 9

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Films, Music

I love Eartha Kitt’s voice. It’s little-girlish and gritty all at once. She reminds me a little bit of Mrs Banks from Mary Poppins, though I don’t know how flattered either of them would be at the comparison.

(I was going to add “…if either of them were still alive, that is” at the end there, but I thought I’d check and though Eartha did indeed leave us last Christmas Day, Glynis Johns is still going strong at 86. So a happy Christmas to her, too, and any other surviving members of the Banks family.)

Weekender

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Music

I was sad to hear that Liam Maher, the singer with Flowered Up, has died. You know how some bands have a sound that instantly sends you back to a time when anything was possible? Flowered Up do that for me. Aged 16, I spent £4.99 on a VHS copy of the 20-minute Weekender video, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I watched it with my friends that year, except that I guarantee that my immediate family will recognise this song as soon as it starts, through no choice of their own.

Liam doesn’t play the video’s hero (and he is a hero), but he has a cameo as the homeless guy who appears just as the song is properly starting (which is just over 3 minutes in; it’s a very long video, which is why it has to be split into two parts to fit on YouTube).

I saw Flowered Up about three years ago on Clapham Common, and they were every bit as good as in the olden days. I suppose everyone thinks the bands of their youth had a unique energy, but – well, just listen to the record. It’s the perfect way to kick off the weekend. Warning: contains swears.