Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII

I have no idea why someone thought to update 1972's Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii in 2025, missing the fiftieth anniversary in doing so, but I welcomed the chance to see it again, this time on a big screen with big loudspeakers.

To save travel time, I chose to go to the Odeon in Kingston and duly paid £25 for my seat. There was some confusion on the day as it was moved to another screen, technical problems, and I ended up in the back row (K) of Screen 4, which was fine.

I am pretty sure that I bought Live at Pompeii at some point in some format now defunct , probably VHS, so I had not seen it for quite a few years and while I could remember some of the songs included I knew that there were gaps in my memory.

They opened with Echos which was an excellent start. A live version of Echos is on my iPhone and I play it several times a year. The sound quality was as good as expected and the video was as good as I should have expected which was good for its time but seriously behind today's standard. That did not matter though, I was there for the songs and they were great.

This was 1972 and Pink Floyd played a selection of their then most known songs including classics like Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Careful with That Axe, Eugene, and A Saucerful of Secrets. They also played Mademoiselle Nobs!

Despite being described as "live" with some post production work in the studio the songs sounded very much like their studio versions, which was again fine.

The film did little other that show the band and the only surprising thing about that was the amount of time spent on Nick Mason who impressed with his casual virtuosity. There were also a few scenes of the band in the studio talking which did not add much except that it gave us a glimpse in to the genesis of Dark Side of the Moon which would change their world for ever and have a big impact on lots of other people too.

As a film, Pink Floyd at Pompeii was not great and was rescued by the copious amounts of music which made it a good experience of any Pink Floyd fan, like me.

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake at Olympic Cinema

I have seen Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake several times, usually at Sadlers Wells, and when a chance Tweet alerted me to it being shown at cinemas I rushed to find a local showing.

Screenings had already started and so my choices were very limited but there was a morning slot at Olympic Cinema in Barnes. I had walked past the building several times and had admired the 1900's architectural style of it so welcomed this chance to go inside.

In less time than it has taken to write this I had booked my ticket for £10.

Getting there was fairly straightforward, two buses, a 65 and a 33, took me more-or-less door to door and in enough time to get a coffee from the cafe in the same building.

It turned out that, somehow that completely escapes me, I had booked for a Babes In Arms screening and the only other people in the cinema where a family with a toddler and a mother with a baby. There was quite a bit of gurgling, whispering and paper rustling but I have had children and am used to ignoring their distracting behaviour.

Besides, this was Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and it would have taken something quite gruesome to spoil that.

Of course Swan Lake starts with the advantage of Tchaikovsky's sumptuous music and I was silently humming along to all the familiar tunes.

Swan Lake made Matthew Bourne's reputation and it is easy to see why. The choreography is busy with so much going on even in the quieter scenes. I spent a lot of time admiring the details of hand and head movements. This is unapologetic contemporary dance with intricate shapes and unusual movements, so unlike the traditional ballet with its jumps and spins.

And because there is just so much details dancing going on all the time a lot of it had been forgotten and could be enjoyed again as if new.

The story is better too with the fill-in dances in the original ballet being incorporated into the story. This is particularly true with the succession of national dances in the ball scene in Act 3.

It is hard to overstate just how much I enjoyed Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake even on film in a cinema shared with children.

After the film there was only one sensible thing to do and that was to have lunch in the Olympic Restaurant. That was a little more pricey than I am used to, but their menu outside had warned me of that and it was well in the price range of a deserved treat.

I think I will be going back to Olympic Cinema and I will most definitely be seeing Swan Lake again the next time I get the opportunity to do so.

Good at Curzon Richmond

I have been lucky enough to see David Tennant on stage a few times so when he returned to do Good with much publicity I was happy to avoid the west end prices and give it a miss. When it came out on NT Live a few months later that was a very different matter and it went from missable to mandatory.

The NT Live website was not as helpful as it could be in showing me possible dates for local cinemas as it was missing the dates for Curzon Richmond that were on their site. To be sure it was on I took the unusual step of booking in person. The confusion helped me because while other cinemas I had checked had all but sold out this one had sold very few seats and I was able to go for on in the primary position, F11 for £19.5.

I have mixed feelings about seeing films of staged plays as the two media are significantly different but in this case I was glad I had gone for the screen rather than the stage as the play was mostly three talking heads and so the ability to zoom in on the speakers was very useful.

Those three heads were David Tennant as John Halder, a German professor, Elliot Levey as his Jewish friend and Sharon Small as several women in his life including his senile mother.

The story, a fairly simple one, showed how John Halder, a good man, gradually got dragged into Naziism and how he rationalised his decisions along the way, including the abandonment of his friend.

Of course there was a lot more to it than that and the story two engrossing hours to tell.

Obviously the key message was to show how easy it was for a good man to become engulfed in evil but the darker message was to compare the first steps with what is happening in Britain today. When Gary Linekar, and many other, point out the similarity between us and 1930's Germany they are exactly right. 

All three actors were very good and Sharon Small impressed most because of the different rolls she played.

I am still not convinced on films of staged plays but I will keep giving them ago when it lets me see shows like this at a reasonable price.

Harvest Time

Harvest is, I believe still Neil Young's biggest selling album having been first released in early 1972. I got into Neil Young a few years later, with 1979's Rust Never Sleeps and while I then bought everything I generally prefer the rockier albums, particularly those with Crazy Horse, to the more country ones (Old Ways is an exception because it had Misfits on it) so Harvest has never made my best-of list.

Of course a not the vest best Neil Young album is still a pretty good thing, it does have Words on it after all, so I was obviously going to see a film made during the recording of the album, a mere fifty years after the event.

The film had a limited release so I went to a showing a Kingston Odeon and willingly paid £15 for.

The film was delightfully casual with nothing (overtly) staged for the camera and it was like being alongside the musicians as they rehearsed and relaxed.

And because these were proper recording sessions the quality of the music was excellent even if the video was commensurate with the handheld cameras of the time.

The music carried the film and there were long sessions with Alabama, Words (hooray! and A Man Needs a Maid, the later being recorded with LSO in, of all places, Barking Town Hall.

I especially enjoyed the many close-ups of the musicians playing and seeing they ease with which they did so as a group.

It was a nice bonus to see Crosby, Stills and Nash recording backing vocals and a bit of a shame that we did not also get to see James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt who were mentioned in the contemporary introduction to the film that Neil recorded. 

There were some lovely little snippets in the non-music sessions too, such as Neil confessing to being a "rich hippie", saying that he had never heard of Pink Floyd (this was just before Dark Side) and comparing the approach to the final Beatles and Buffalo Springfield albums.

As with the Sparks documentary, The Sparks Brothers (now on Netflix), there was so much more that I wanted to see, things like the composition process and the reasons for working with LSO, but there is a limit to what you can include in a film running to just over two hours and in choosing to focus on the music Harvest Time got the balance right.

The Father at Curzon Richmond was superb

I like watching films but am not much of a cinema fan (for reasons that probably make no sense) and am usually happy to wait for them to hit the small screen so it takes something special to drag me out. The Father was certainly special enough to do that.

My primary interest was in the story and the story teller. I had seen the play at Richmond Theatre in 2016 and that had led me to see other Florian Zeller plays subsequently. If any further temptation was needed then the promise of an Oscar winning performance from Anthony Hopkins was more than enough.

It was towards the end of the run at Curzon Richmond before I got organised enough to book and so I found myself going at 8:30pm on a Friday evening.

A pleasant upside of that timing was the opportunity to make a first return visit to Wagamama for a year where a vegan Tofu Firecracker was exceptional. I also had time for a pint in The Olde Ship which was useful after the Firecracker.

This was only my second visit to Curzon Richmond and I had forgotten that I could get a real coffee  to take in, which was a much better option than another beer.

The Father did what I knew it would from having seen the play but it did it in a different way taking advantage of the things that films can do, like change locations quickly.

The simple, poignant, heart-wrenching story was the neurological decline of The Father. It was told from his perspective, though not in the first person, and that meant that characters changed their appearances, changed where they were living and changed what they had said. There were multiple actors playing the same role and also different roles, e.g. two played the daughter and one of those also played a nurse. We were always a little confused as to what was really going on and that gave us just a clue as to how The Father saw things.

Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as The Father as I knew he would be because he had played a similar role with great aplomb in Red 2. He is also a bloody good actor in everything else that I have seen him in.

The rest of the production, including the fabulously furnished flats and the gentle cinematography enriched the experience without ever detracting from the centrepiece of the drama, The Father.

Given the subject matter, neurodisability, it was never going to be an easy film to watch, and nor would it be to everyone's taste, but it held my full attention for an hour and a half and was very rewarding if not, in the usual sense of the word, entertaining. 

Mission: Impossible – Fallout; a mission too far

Christmas time means watching a lot of films and I caught Mission: Impossible – Fallout almost by accident, I saw it on the TV schedule after it had started and watched from the beginning on my iPad using the All4 app.

I wish I had not bothered.

The film has had consistently good, or even great, reviews Wikipedia tells me but I felt it moved too far from Mission Impossible towards Mission Dynamic. It was more like a poor Bond film with Ethan Hunt very much front and centre and with the usual action movie scenes of car chases, shoot-outs and running across rooftops.

Too often Hunt admitted to not having a plan when having a cunning plan is the whole point of the franchise.

Presumably somebody in the script team had seen 1993's Cliffhanger, with Sylvester Stallone playing the action lead, and thought that they would just steal a scene from that without anyone noticing. Well I noticed and Cliffhanger is a much better film.

How I mention it, Cliffhanger also does big locations better and the dramatic mountain scenery is a key part of the film. Early MI films had given us locations like Prague, Sydney Harbour and the tallest building in the world whereas Fallout seemed to spend most of its time in underground car parks.

The film also felt as though the producers realised that it was not working and so they pumped it full of unnecessary and distracting music to fill the space where the story should have been.

There were a couple of clever rubber-faced screens but these were too short and both too obvious and they had nothing like the impact that they did in, say, MI2.

Apparently there are two more MI films in the works. I'll be watching those too so I hope they are better than this one. I can forgive one dud in a good series.

High-Rise successfully captured the atmosphere of the book

I had wanted to see High-Rise for some weeks and I finally managed to get to a late showing on a Saturday night. My enthusiasm came from my love of the book by JG Ballard on which it is based.

High Rise was the third in his trilogy of contemporary dystopian novels Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975). I bought all of these as they came out and loved them all. Earlier novels had been set in dystopian futures, e.g. one with sever flooding (The Drowned World), but these were set in current times and twisted normal people and normal situations to create worlds that were both very recognisable and very strange. The opening line of High-Rise makes this tension obvious from the very start, "As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."

But this is about the film and not the book.

I was in the cosy Odeon Studios Screen 8 which my phone told me I was last in six years earlier to see Red. There were about thirty of us in there which I thought was a good turnout for a film released several weeks previously. When I saw V for Vendetta we were the only two people in a much larger cinema.

Ballard's dystopian novels are very much about how people think and the plot is a way of presenting his characters with different situations to contend with rather than a telling a story about events. The film took this approach too and concentrated on two characters Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) and TV documentary maker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) with strong support from a stella cast that included Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, James Purefoy,  Keeley Hawes and Reece Shearsmith. An action film does not need a cast like that but a film about people does.

I do not know where they found the High-Rise block or how much of it was generated on a computer but the brutalist architecture and the interiors were perfect for the story. I would have wanted to live there too. I presume that at least some of it was false as the roof-top garden was unbelievably large. If it does exist then I want to go there.

It was a while since I read the book and while I think that there were some significant differences, possibly different emphasises rather than changes, I was pleased to see some of the original ideas appear, such as opening the film with the opening sentence.

The incidental music was a nice touch too and I nearly screamed with excitement when I heard Amon Duul's Fly United. This comes from their '73 album Vive La Trance which was right for the film. I've bought the album twice.

There were lots and lots of other nice touches throughout the film that either added to the psychological tension, highlighted some aspect of the period or provided a touch of humour. The horse and cheese-knife incident was but one example. 

Overall, like Crash had, I thought that High-Rise captured the atmosphere of the original book and that is what I wanted it to do. It was a highly entertaining film and the two hours flew by.

Thor: The Dark World

Thor: The Dark World follows on from the first film with all of the same ingredients intact.

It has the same characters and the same actors playing them. This time introductions are dispensed with in the safe assumption that everybody has seen the first film. This brings the action to the fore faster and so is a good thing.

The story is rooted in Norse mythology, that is the mood and characters of the myths rather than the actual stories.

This heritage is particularly helpful in building the city of Asgard which is both ancient and modern at the same time.

The modern dialogue and characterisation add a continual layer of humour on top of a world-threatening plot.

There is nothing heavy or difficult about the story and there are large chunks of it that have been seen before (alignment of celestial bodies, etc.) but it does enough to carry the film along while the little touches, like the dialogue, add the texture.

It is all very watchable and it easily kept me entertained for the best part of two hours. I could ask for no more though having seen it at the cinema I'll not be rushing out to get the DVD. I'll watch it again when it hits TV in a couple of years though.

Kick Ass 2 lived up to expectations

I do not venture to the cinema so often these days, mainly because films get to DVD so quickly now, so it was a little strange to find myself back there watching Kick Ass 2 so soon after watching Red 2.

There are a lot of similarities between them, and some notable differences too. Both are based on comics (Red much less so) and both feature comic violence and comedy. Red is not Die Hard and Kick Ass is not Batman.

Both sequels copied the mood and style of their originals and, therefore, gave their fans just what they expected and what they wanted.

Whereas Red 2 just reused the characters from Red, Kick Ass 2 continued to retell the story of the comic. That made Kick Ass 2 more like Kick Ass Chapter 2 than a Second Kick Ass as it continued where Kick Ass finished off and took the main characters in some new directions, such as Mindy coming to terms with being an orphan and a teenage girl.

The story is a key part of Kick Ass 2 but I'll not say much about it because that's what spoilers do.

Otherwise it is much the same as Kick Ass with ludicrous violence, none of which feels remotely real, and strong language, though I only spotted one c-bomb and that was in Russian (with a helpful English text translation).

That there is more of a story this time around makes the film more gripping and engaging, there were several threads where I really cared about what happened next.

Jim Carrey is (almost) the only name actor in it, taking this role from Nicholas Cage who died in Kick Ass. Carrey is surprisingly good and un-Carrey-like, a view derived from only seeing him previously in films like The Mask and The Grinch. This Carrey may be a little weird but he is not wacky. There is also a brief spot for Iain Glen, which was a pleasant surprise having seen him on stage earlier this year staring in a Chekhov play.

Hit Girl provides some of the best moments as there is something enchanting and cute watching a young teenage girl cut a team of tough baddies in to shreds (literally).

Kick Ass 2 builds on Kick Ass with skill, flair and a story. That makes II better than I and raises the bar for III.

RED2 is a lot of fun

Having set the scene and established the main characters in RED in 2010, the sequel RED2 gets off to a quick start and never relents. It is very much more of the same and that's exactly what I expected and wanted.

The plot is much the same too with the authorities out to kill the Retired and Extremely Dangerous agents. This time this includes the authorities in Russia and England, and there's a detour to Paris too.

We lost one of the heroes in RED when the Morgan Freeman character was killed, but all the others are back and this time they have to content with Catherine Zeta-Jones as a Russia agent from Bruce Willis' past and Anthony Hopkins as a mad English inventor of WMDs.

Bruce Willis is calm and assured while John Malkovich is delightfully eccentric and this time he continually frustrates Willis by teaching his girlfriend some of the tricks of the agent's trade; she's keen to join the gang while he wants to keep her out of it and safe.

Helen Mirren threatens to steal the show at times and features in some of the film's nicest moments, including one that pays homage to her roles as the Queen. The shooting from within a speeding Lotus is cool but the bit that I liked the most was when she was on the phone and calmly disposing of some bodies at the same time.

The plot bounces along nicely and twists in several directions to maintain interest. But what really makes the film are all the little touches in the characters, the dialogue and the action. It is an absolute blast and I laughed with delight all the way through.

Now to pre-order the DVD.

Bourne Legacy

I love the Bourne films, and watch them most times that they are shown on TV, so it was an easy decision to get Bourne Legacy as soon as it appeared on DVD for some early Christmas entertainment.

Rather like Skyfall, it builds on the established canon and creates a creditable platform for further adventures with some new characters. But, unlike Skyfall, it forgets to add a plot or to take the franchise forward. Bourne 4 is a new Bourne 1 that is not as good as the original Bourne 1.

It is slow to get going and slow to introduce the new ideas that really do not require much time to explain as they are essentially the same as the old ideas.

Bourne 4 also lacks charm. We cared about Jason Bourne in the original trilogy, and we cared for the girl too. In Bourne 1 we meet the man before we see the agent. This emotional empathy lifted Bourne above a simple action story yet this has either been forgotten or deliberately dropped. In Bourne 4. Here we only ever see the agent.

Its one strength is its action scenes yet even these rely too heavily on what has gone before. The car chase is the one from Moscow in Bourne 2 and the rooftop chase is Algiers from Bourne 3.

If Bourne 4 were the only Bourne film then it would have some merit. As the prequel to an intriguing Bourne 5 it may still have some. But as a series reboot or a standalone film Bourne 4 misses all the tricks that Skyfall plays so well and emerges as just an average film and a huge missed opportunity.

Skyfall is the Bond film you always wanted to see

If I am not mistaken, the last Bond film that I went to the cinema to see was The Man with the Golden Gun and that was back in 1974. I would normally wait for the DVD these days but I was tempted in to the Odeon Richmond by the overwhelmingly positive reviews, mostly from friends on Twitter, and a free Monday evening.

The reviews are essentially right. Skyfall is a positive restart for Bond. Gone are the sillier gadgets and the incessant womanising, though these are not lost completely, this is still Bond after all.

Similarly a lot of the action takes place in the UK rather than gratuitous foreign beauty spots, not that they are completely absent either. There is a believable baddie and a coming-of-age plot that kills off a few current themes and sets up some new ones.

It is all rather neat and tidy and sets Bond up nicely for the next fifty years.

All that is very good but there is one serious drawback. This is Bond as Batman. To be specific this is Bond as Batman in The Dark Knight. If you do not want to know why then stop reading!

Raoul Silva is the Joker. He thinks and moves like the Joker and, more importantly, he makes the "two rats" analogy just like the Joker claims that he and Batman are like each other and so are natural opponents. Bond's mother, M, is killed. Bond's ancestral home is destroyed.

The deliberate copying, and it is hard to believe that it could be anything else, is a negative that the film struggles to overcome. It does that well enough for the copying to be forgiven if not forgotten. It is still a very good film and I will be buying the DVD.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Films escape on to DVD so quickly these days that it takes something pretty unusual to entice me in to the cinema.

Previously that has been things like Avatar in 3D and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the final instalment of the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (the original version in Swedish, of course).

This time it was just the happy circumstance of being near a cinema, on a free afternoon, when I film I quite fancied watching was just about to start.

Having the Odeon iPhone app to hand helped make this happen.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (a.k.a. MI4) arrived five years after MI3 which is a long time to wait for another chapter.

MI4 acknowledges its place in the canon. Some characters from previous stories appear, including one of the core team with Ethan, and we also hear what happened to Ethan's wife who played a large part in the previous film.

The Ghost Protocol is a simple but clever device to simplify the technology deployed which (mostly) takes us away from the high-tech stunts that have characterised some of the previous films.

This helps to make the film less episodic and more continuous with the stunts supporting the plot rather than the other way round. Overall the feel is more like the old TV series where there is more drama from the possibility of their schemes being detected than from them going wrong.

Of course there are stunts and the main one is the climb of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the worlds tallest building.

This was a little overpowering for someone with my vertiginous tendencies and I found myself sliding back in my seat so that I would not fall of it.

And that was typical of the film; tense, dramatic and exciting. The plot twisted nicely a couple of times too, sometimes to twist again in another direction.

I went in to the cinema expecting something classy and clever but essentially superficial. What I got was a lot more. This is a really good film and leaves you panting for MI5.

The only thing that let it down was the end. The very end. As Ethan walks towards the camera for the last time he has clearly got his iPhone earphones on the wrong way round. Somebody should tell him the microphone goes on the right.

RED

RED is a triumphant addition to the rapidly growing list of films based on comics.

And it comes with some serious pedigree, the original comic was written by Warren Ellis and the film's stars include Bruce Willis and John Malkovich.

Last Saturday I helped myself to a double-dose of RED by watching the film then reading the comic. It was not a strategic decision to do things in that order it's just that I was not able to buy the comic any earlier.

About fifty of us crammed into one of the small theatres in the Odeon Studio in Richmond and quite an odd group we were too ranging from small boys (under ten) to grannies (over seventy) with a smattering of young women. I was expecting just lads of all ages.

RED hits the ground running and never stops. Within the first minutes Bruce has single-handedly taken out a SWAT team who fired even more bullets than were used in The Matrix.

The film continues in much the same rich vein of action laced with clever humour. There's a good plot too and some wonderful acting by people who are obviously playing their roles more for the fun than the money. It really was a lot of fun.

The comic came as bit of a surprise having seen the film as the only element common to both is the hardly original theme of an ex-CIA agent been chased by his former colleagues. Perhaps they paid Warren Ellis just for the name RED.

The comic is more about a killer coming to terms with what he has done and, as such, brings to mind Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered. It's a short comic, only three issues in the collected edition, so there is less to get your teeth in to than the film and so, while the comic has undoubted merit, it's hard to recommend it to a casual reader.

The same is true of Kick Ass and Wanted, both of which are reasonable comics but much better films.

Big Picture: Britannia Hospital

Big Picture is the cultured younger brother of Big Ideas and the two have many good features in common.

Both events happen in London once a month and both allow you to stretch the thinking muscles in stimulating company. But Big Ideas struts its stuff flamboyantly in Fitzrovia whereas Big Picture prefers to lurk in Kensal Green. Thank the gods for Google Maps and the TfL Journey Planner.

The exact location is the marvellously exotic Paradise By Way of Kensal Green that has more rooms than seems sensible and which are put together in a way that most definitely isn't. These rooms are packed with what can only be called paraphernalia that somehow avoids looking cluttered. It's all a little odd and all the more attractive because of this.

The evening starts with a drink and a snack. Both are a little thin on the ground in a pub which seems to cater more for the volume consumer (a few of which are there to prove the point) than the connoisseur so its Becks Vier and a bowl of chunky chips for me.

Then as the clock strikes 7:30 the film begins and the twenty or so of us settle in to our chairs to watch.

This month's offering was Britannia Hospital a British black comedy from 1982.

Two minor things struck me immediately that I'll mention then move on to more serious things.

Like many British films it seems to delight in getting as many British actors as possible in to it and it took a little while to get used to seeing different versions of Robbie Coltrane, Leonard Rossiter, Robin Asquith, Thora Hurd, et al. Actually, some of the portrayals were not that unfamiliar possibly suggesting type-casting or limited acting ability.

The other surprise was the acceptably racist language of the age - it's a long time since I've heard words like "wog".

The film is somewhat hard to describe, as the post-film discussion confirmed, but it's safe to say that it includes belligerent trade unions, private medicine, class/royalty, police violence, colonialism mingled with racism, Frankenstein's monster and a very negative critique of the effect of humans on the planet.

The points are made mostly through humour and the violence is more Keystone Cops than SPG. Even the various heads coming off evoke more of a chuckle than a retch.

The discussion certainly helped me to appreciate the film tough there were, not surprisingly, some disputes among us as to what the film was trying to say and how it was trying to say it. I added a few comments to the mix, not letting my complete lack of knowledge of film get in the way of a good argument. Among these was the observation that the only winners in the film (if there were any winners and if winning mattered) were the two mobs.

The discussion and final beer over I headed home and was pleasantly surprised at how easy that was even if, to be completely honest, I ended up going on a slightly different route from the one I intended.

My first Big Picture was a great success on several fronts and did more than enough to tempt me back.

Masopust, a short film by Tereza Buskova

My exposure to art tends to be infrequent, intense and a little idiosyncratic, which is just how I like it. Tereza Buskova's new film, Masopust, meets the bill.


The location

The small private viewing was held on the top floor of a mixed office block in Wardour Street (never found out why).

Here Soho maintains a low profile thanks to entrenched and enlightened property laws and so the not-too-distant Centre Point stands out defiantly and proudly above the clutter of chimney pots and roof gardens.

This is a world unseen and unimagined by the workers and tourists thronging the narrow streets of Soho below in search of pleasures that the area is famous for - and in this modern world I mean the many pubs and restaurants, not the establishments light in red!

The artist

I first met Tereza (she tells) me back in 2005 when as a student she briefly occupied a small gallery in Wandsworth. I heard this through my Czechoslovak connections and as Wandsworth was more or less on my way home I popped in and a few wines later I bought a picture that now sits in my front room prominently above the telly.

Since then I have been to a few more of her exhibitions in various galleries across London. She has grown in stature as an artist and has been promoted by the likes of the Czech Centre.

Tereza has also got married and is now healthily pregnant.

The art 

The film is inspired by a traditional ritual performed each Winter in a small village in Moravia.

As you might expect, this involves colourful costumes (like the flowered hats the men wear), dancing and references to marriage / fertility / sex.

Colour, hats and sex are also themes common in Tereza's work.

The film records Tereza's version of the ritual being performed by people from the village with two of her regular models, both of whom were at the screening.

The ritual itself made little sense to me, not being Czech or Moravian did not help here, and on a technical level (use of camera angles etc.) the film is pretty simplistic but that is not what it is about for me. I loved the colourful shapes that Tereza made, nicely offset by the snow white background.

The event

As a tableau of separate images I found the film captivating and enthralling and I hope that I did a reasonable job of trying to explain why in the post screening discussion that followed where I was battling amongst people a lot more arty than me.

After the talk there was a second equally captivating showing followed by more talk eased by wine. I was able to exchange pleasantries with Tereza's mum, some other lovers of Glydebourne and with Martin who I met back at the first showing in Wandsworth.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening in ways that I expected and in ways that I did not. That's why I like living in London and being invited to these sort of events!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

It has been a while since I’ve written anything about films, mainly because it has been a while since I’ve seen a film worth writing about.

I watch, and generally enjoy, several films a week but these are often described as “action” and feature the likes of Bruce Willis or Jason Statham and so are high on entertainment (and explosions) but low on artistic merit.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is different.

It is hard to escape the phenomena that Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has become, not least because it is impossible to travel on the tube without seeing somebody read one of the books.

The success of the books has, rightly, spawned films. The original films, like the original books, are set in Sweden and are in Swedish. Remakes in English are already planned but as the DVD release of the first original shows, there are perfectly acceptable alternatives with English subtitles and an English voice-over available. I went for the Swedish voices with English subtitles which had the advantage of forcing me to pay attention to the screen. The laptop actually abandoned my lap for a while!

I had not read the book so had little idea of what to expect, except for the clues given by the 18 rating and the mention of torture in one of the reviews that I heard on Radio 4.

The plot is a complex whodunit (but less complex than the book, apparently) and it took me a while to work out who the goodies were, let alone the baddies, or even if there was a baddie at all!

For around two and a half hours the plot and the two main characters had me twister around their little fingers and I was powerless to do anything apart from sit and watch and try to understand.

I enjoyed it greatly, will watch it again and will get the next film as soon as it comes out. Think I’ll give the American remakes a miss though.

Feasting on Avatar in 3D

I do not tend to go to the cinema that often but it is the holiday season and Avatar 3D is on so it seemed like a good way to spend a Saturday evening. Preceded by the usual visit to Pizza Express, of course.

Apart from the graphics I was not sure what to expect. What Avatar delivers in spades is a visual feast with just enough of a plot, simple and obvious though it is, to hang it all together for a thrilling two and a half hours.

The CGI is stunning, so much so that I was not sure at times if we were looking at real faces or computer generated ones.

But if the faces were good then the scenery and animals were even better.

The alien flora and fauna reminded me of the alien worlds that sprung from Philip Jose Farmer's fertile imagination, and that's a compliment to the creative minds that devised them.

The landscapes were also fantastic but floating mountains and large stone archways reminded me of Roger Dean's fantasy art that adorns many of my favourite albums for the 1970s when prog rock ruled (and rightly so).

I've shown here just a couple of examples of Roger Dean's work that are similar to scenes in Avatar but there are twenty eight examples at io9.com.

Roger Dean's own website also recognises the issue without making a direct comment; it simply suggests that you do a google search for "avatar roger dean" and draw your own conclusion. I'm convinced.

I'm less convinced about the 3D. There were no spears thrown into the audience or other such extreme effects but there did seem to be a greater depth to the image and some objects, such as the airborne seeds, did seem to hover above the audience.

I will just have to watch it in 2D next time to spot the differences. Hopefully they will not be that big otherwise I'll be forced to buy a 3D home entertainment system before too long!

But, the minor quibbles do not detract from what is a great cinematic experience. Avatar 3D has set a new standard for visual impact and I am delighted that I have had the opportunity to savour it.

Dobre rano, Slovensko!

A showing of the documentary Dobre rano, Slovensko! (Good Morning Slovakia!) was the second BCSA event of the week, this time organised in conjunction with the UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies.

The film was introduced by its producer, Fedor Gal, who played a part in Slovakia's emergence from behind the Iron Curtain in the Winter of 89/90.

Sadly I do not know yet exactly what his role was as technical difficulties meant that we had to watch the film in Slovak, which it may surprise you to learn, is not one of the one languages that I speak.

Luckily the Q&A session was translated so I was able to follow that part easily enough.

I had to leave the drinks reception afterwards fairly early but was there long enough to speak to a few new Czechs/Slovaks who I hope to see at other BCSA events and also to get an offer from Fedor Gal to send me the English version of the film, which I am looking forward too.

Almost all of the retrospectives on 1989 in the UK have focused on Germany and so it was good not just to hear fromCzechoslovakia but actually from the Slovak part.

The Italian Job (2003) is fun

It is bit of a cheek to call the 2003 film The Italian Job as it really has little to do with the 1969 original, but if we put that aside and judge the film solely on its merits then it stands up on its own right as a high-action heist story.

The minis are there from the original film but they play a lesser role this time and, instead, we get a well thought out and enacted plot to rob a security van and so recover gold bars that .... who cares about the plot, focus on the action!

The best bit is at the end, as it should be in an action film, when the robbery takes place and the current owner of the bullion tries to get it back.

The Pink Floyd music at the end, the predictable, appropriate and masterful "Money", adds a nice touch too.

I think that the best way to judge a film is by its rewatchability (good word that) and I'm writing this as I watch The Italian Job for the third or fourth time so far this year. Great stuff!