8-14May2011 :: This Week

15May2011 [weekly]

• imdb:tt0120667

• Went to Mobile Monday Sydney, which featured a preview of the BlackBerry Playbook; a nice night, but it seemed a bit self-congratulatory, and RIM's messaging around the PlayBook seems really confused.
• Read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (amazon); I'd loved the film, and the book is similarly great; my reading of it was influenced somewhat by the film, especially with certain knowledge that is only slowly revealed in the book, but it was nonetheless enjoyable; on balance, I think the film is probably better than the book, perhaps because it handles the genre issue in a better manner, making the story less about the sci-fi by getting the setting out in the open early on, but the book is great speculative fiction; it's well told and well written, with a beautiful languid pace through much of it, though the conceit of a first-person memoir/retelling grates occasionally (too much oh-that-reminds-me or but-I'll-come-to-that that pulls otherwise disparate tales together).
• Watched Sydney Symphony's Mahler 10 performance, sub-titled Love and Death; it featured a concerto for two pianos first, with Pascal and Ami Rogé on the pianos, performing a fun, if sometimes saccharine, piece composed by Australian Matthew Hindson as a commission especially as a wedding gift for the couple; the two pianos are positioned side-by-side surrounded by the orchestra, and towards the end Ami climbs over to Pascal's piano and they play together — almost too cute, but it works well; the Mahler symphony followed, the orchestra performing Barshai's ten-year-old completion, Mahler having died leaving it in draft and outline form; I'm not sure how much of the piece is Mahler and how much is Barshai — its sound is certainly consistent with Mahler, but it also seems to prefigure the 20th century in many ways; it's also an evidently deeply personal symphony, with Mahler coming to grips with his impending death, the knowledge of his wife's affair, and his Catholic faith (converted from Judaism); the piece is full of conflict, a mix of hopeful elements and very dark tones and touches, and ends, not necessarily resolved, but in a soft peace.
• Watched Fantastic Four (imdb); passable as fluffy entertainment, and the cast and FX do the job, but the story is awfully weak, really just serving as an introduction to the team and their villain; I'd've thought, given just how ridiculously campy the Fantastic Four and Dr Doom are as a bunch of characters, it would've been better to cram introductions into the first twenty minutes and then make something happen; the weight of events and character circumstances (and names!) that have to fall into place by sheer coincidence are too much for even an adventure film to get away with, especially when it takes itself too seriously to have a good laugh at its circumstance.
• Read Tina Fey's Bossypants (amazon); average writing, but funny throughout, and full of insights both into the world of comedy and entertainment and into what it means to be a woman (and a mother) in the modern workforce.
• Have also picked up tickets to my SydFilmFest Ten for 2011 (cf last year); the festival includes a couple of must-sees (Norwegian Wood!), and a whole range of interesting things, with docos and features from Australia and around the world; ten films is about the most I can fit while still working and retaining my sanity, but I could easily have pushed to twenty picks if I were less concerned about staying sane; besides Norwegian Wood, I'm seeing The Troll Hunter (Norwegian monster movie), Sleeping Beauty ("erotic fairytale"), Tomboy (French; "quiet, unassuming"), Beats Rhymes & Life (doco on A Tribe Called Quest), Target (Russian scifi), A Separation (Iranian, "emotionally resonant"), I Wish I Knew (doco on Shanghai), Black & White & Sex (film and sex), 13 Assassins (violence).