It's the Queen's English, Innit?

The first and most unnerving thing about this film are the scenes that feature 6, 7 or eight year-old princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It is completely impossible to see them without feeling jarred and second-guessed by our own memories of the dessicated, pinched, cornered vision of Englishness that the Windsors have come to represent.

It's a wonderful piece of drama in spite of the protagonists. Deceitful, fraudulent Australian 'therapist' hoodwinks desperate, pompous Royal into bizarre theatre-based treatment regime for his stutter. You'd think it would be hard to make anything dramatic or engaging cinematically with this. By the simple expedient of using a chilly, foggy, dusty lighting and design aesthetic (thereby side-stepping the emetic heritage visual cues that get these films flogged to death abroad) and getting brilliant actors in close-up like Rush and Bonham-Carter to, well, act, and not do anything to distract from this, it works rather beautifully. Guy Pearce is pallid, acidic, petulant, honest and thereby blends into the film excellently.

Wasp Lights

This 25 minute short film only came up on my radar when it found its way on to the bonus features of a DVD of Andrea Arnold's gob-smacking "Fish Tank".

It's a torrent of a film, plunging us down stairwells, plonking us on the pavement outside council-estate pubs, unceremoniously dumping us on the scrubby grass between residential tower blocks as vindictive rows play their joyless way out over our heads.

Within about 45 seconds of the film starting I knew I cared about this woman and her children, and about what would have happened to them by the end of the day, and about whether the simple business of finding some food and going on a date would be too much for her.

It just goes to show that the Oscar committee might not be completely dominated by star-struck cheese-merchants that "Wasp" won an award for best live-action short film.

Heart-rending and brutal in the same frame.

All-Day Hollywood

A 10 hour flight from Seoul to London, living in the non-time, non-place of the (very decent) Korean Airlines Boeing. This non-experience in a non-environment is exactly the right time to watch Hollywood films. The place where time drifts confusingly and illogically; where people behave very consistently but completely insincerely; where workers in the most unhealthy and grindingly repetitive, toxic jobs retain first-class skin care and make-up; where camaraderie is forced and dictatorial; where the network lives on completely independently of the people in it.

All three of these films were completely preposterous: Oliver Stone tried to shoehorn a family drama into his torrent of stable-door moralising and his film's credibility drowned early doors; Clooney remains very watchable on a big screen (though this is a very poor re-heating of the leftover excitement from "Michael Clayton") but the story here vanishes in the vastly-cinematographed Italian hill-scapes; "The Town"'s producers could afford to supply enough excitement for a crime caper, but ran out of cash when they had to buy some character-development and writing talent.

All that sounds harsh, but I'm dreadfully jet lagged.

Fractured Languages

At the Sejong Centre Special Exhibition in Seoul, there is a very digestible retrospective exhibition of the work of Ungno Lee (이응노), 1904-1989, a painter with tapestries and collage.

Being as I am beginning to learn to write and read Korean, these strange agglomerations of forms and vocabularies made a lot of sense.

The real skill was in making sure that there was nothing that really reminded us of an actual letter from the Korean of English alphabets in there. Vertical and horizontal suggestions, scatterings of punctuation, mountains of characters unfettered by page-lines, are presented on carpet-textures, hessian materials. The colours are very undemonstrative, very carefully chosen to not get in the way, such that the colour is always there, but isn't the point at all.

In some of the pieces, the characters almost melt into the the texture of the fabric, such that forms and ground are unable to resist each-other, or language and page cannot remain differentiated. Furry art should also be strongly encouraged.

Mana Wind Howls

At Taey's opening night we were very happy to get a short performance from the brilliant Whang Bo Ryung (황보령), playing solo with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment.

Her voice is a marvel just by itself- gravelly, heavily textured and full of gradient, accelerating from half-reflective dream-talk to full-throated aggro-punk yelp in the space of a bar.

The songs veered wildly across rapid, almost Celtic strumming, to rippling and unresolved arpeggiation, to sprawling, panoramic landscape.

With any luck, we will be able to see her play a big show on the 30th in Seoul in support of the vast and unpredictable "Mana Wind" record, which has been soundtracking our mornings here this last week.

Older and Angrier

Chris and I were at the Camden Underworld last week, sharing a warren of bad-tempered bars with an embarrassingly male crowd, many of whom were plainly mourning the passing of Sleazy Christopherson from TG the previous night.

The support band plainly had no awareness of this, as they were two fresh faced Canadian women on a rush from some greasy cross-channel ferry to make the show on time. The name "Pack A.D." didn't bode well, but they were a brilliant object lesson in using every ounce of capability and nerve they possess to exponential effect. The drummer was using her sticks like hammers, and barely played off the 1 and the 3 all gig. This didn't matter in the slightest as she was plainly the social and logistical lynchpin of the group; her compadre was a razor-blade slim guitarist who played deceptively simple chords and riffs, but never the same one for very long at a time. Her singing had the traumatic bawl of a Kristin Hersh and the urgency of Johnny Cash. None of their songs seemed the same, which is always a sign of a great group.

No Means No have a set of songs that don't even sound like songs, which is why we love them so much. A blizzard of contorted, compulsive gestures, tunes and rages, kicking off with a squall of frustration called "Old": 'The older I get/ the angrier I am'. Glorious stuff.

Malfeasance

Stacy Makishi once again strides into uncharted, snowbound and doughnut-shaped territory, in search of something that sounds like identity, but thankfully turns out not to be. Her performance of "Bull: The True Story" at the Chelsea Theatre delights in flooding the pre-show audience with the performance, and contaminating the performance with the audience.

Two guests from the audience are blindfolded, and stood in front of a doughnut suspended by string from the ceiling; they lick and prod with their noses, hesitantly. Stacy is possessed by the spirit of characters within "Fargo", weirdly re-enacting responses and motor functions from the movie and pre-empting her audience's relationship with the doughnut.

This chilling symptom-esque physical projection is a parallel of the disturbing story of a (real?) Japanese woman searching for the fictional (?) money buried in the snow in the film "Fargo"; Stacy embeds vanishings and noisy fictions into the performance without so much as a missed missing persons poster. If this wasn't already enough, there's a tour de force of a self-re-morphing with a pair of tights pulled grotesquely over her head. Winning stuff.