Automatic Autumn Auto-Portrait

Thanks to last night's clock change, I had some time to kill before heading out to play cards and eat an early roast dinner. Hyde Park, which is one of my two closest parks and current favourite for weekend running, was looking gorgeous yesterday morning, all burnt sienna, amber and green, so I decided to take my camera for a walk.

It wasn't exactly Montreal in there but it was still very pretty and as today was pretty grey and cloudy, the park wasn't too busy, which meant I was able to take some self-portraits using the timer on my camera without too much in the way of embarrassment. I only have a mini tripod and at first I thought I might have needed a bigger one but I quite like the effect of the leaves on the grass, immediately, in front of the camera. I never wear autumn colours like orange or green but the deep purply-blues and indigos that I favour are pretty much opposite the orange-browns of the autumn leaves on the colour wheel and so my outfit wasn't entirely out of place.

Autumn in Hyde Park, complete with Boris Biker

Drop Dead Gorgeous

The most disappointing thing about Miss Bala was that even after watching the film, I still didn't understand why it was called Miss Bala rather than Miss Baja or even Miss Baja California given that the film's heroine of sorts, Laura (Stephanie Sigman), is hoping to win the Miss Baja California beauty pageant. I should have just checked in a Spanish dictionary before, of course, because it turns out that bala is the Spanish word for bullet. Who knew? In any case, there are far more scenes with bullets than scenes of the beauty pageant in Gerardo Naranjo's new film, which boasts Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as executive producers, as well as former model Sigman as its star. This is not a Mexican version of the darkly funny Drop Dead Gorgeous, although as Laura spends much of the movie fearing for her life, they could just have called the English translation Drop Dead.


Miss Bala is an intense and draining film about a young woman, Laura, who is living a quiet life in Tijuana with her father and much younger brother but who dreams of becoming Miss Baja California. We don't get to see much of her dreaming of this, however. After she and her best friend Suzu make it through the initial audition, they go out to a club to celebrate (this being Tijuana, the "VIP area" is just a less crowded part of the large tent this club seems to occupy, complete with plastic garden furniture). Laura wants to go home but Suzu is having too good a time with her boyfriend. While Laura is in the bathroom, a number of heavily armed gangster types break into the building, ask if she's going to tell anyone what she's seen and, when she says no, let her rejoin her friends. Heavy gunfire follows and Laura barely manages to escape. But when Laura shows up for the pageant rehearsal the following morning, she finds out Suzu hasn't shown up yet; oh, and she and Suzu have been kicked out for being late.

Laura tries to track down her friend, asking a taxi driver if he can try to find out where Suzu is using his radio; he agrees, grudgingly, but then hands Laura over to the gangsters, led by Lino Valdez (Noe Hernandez), who takes a liking to Laura, despite the fact she seems to be sticking her nose where it isn't wanted. He offers to help her find Suzu as long as she does some "errands" for him. These errands include driving getaway cars, parking the car Lino uses to dump some bodies outside the US embassy, travelling to San Diego to pass on large wodges of cash and collect some information, and so on. The descent of Laura's world into one filled with terror, crime and drugs is shockingly rapid. Lino seems to want to be Laura's friend or protector (and maybe more) and he offers to help get her back into Miss Baja California, even though by this point, all Laura wants is for her life to go back to normal, but as the film makes its dark, bleak progress, this seems like an increasingly unlikely dream.

Sigman is fantastic as the brave but terrified Laura and Hernandez manages to ooze untrustworthiness from every pore, even as he appears to treat Laura kindly and to want to help her. The film itself is suspenseful and, at times, difficult to watch: even when something very bad has just happened, the sense of unease Naranjo creates means you always get the feeling that something even worse is just about to take place.

Familiarity Breeds Bad-Ass Viruses

I finally got around to seeing Contagion tonight; I say "finally" because although it has only been out for a week in the UK, it had already been released in the US when I was in New York and so it feels like it's been around for a long time. Some spoilers may follow, although to be honest, it really isn't the kind of film that has major twists. It is just a rigorous, detailed account of what happens and who is affected when a bad-ass new infectious disease appears on the scene.

As Contagion opens, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is returning to Minnesota from a business trip in Hong Kong. She's been feeling pretty crappy but, it turns out, she has just enough time to breathe over some dice for luck in a casino, allow an Estonian woman to handle her phone and meet up with her former lover in Chicago. By the time she gets home, husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is seriously worried about her and within a couple of days she has had several seizures and died, her young son (Mitch's step-son) also dying. Mitch, it transpires, is immune, although his teenage daughter, who was at her mother's house while Beth was infecting everyone, is probably not. Before long, tens, then hundreds and thousands of people all over the world are becoming sick while scientists struggle even to work out what is causing the disease, let alone how to stop it.

At the CDC, we have Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) who is working on finding a vaccine, while CDC bigwig Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to prevent people from finding out too much about the epidemic and panicking. He sends Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) out to Minnesota to study some of the victims and talk to their relatives to find any connections between the outbreak. A San Francisco virologist (Elliott Gould) is making progress but CDC tell him he has to shut down; he carries on regardless and fortunately, makes a crucial breakthrough. Meanwhile, in Geneva, epidemiologist Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is trying to find patient one; she thinks it is Beth but trying to persuade people in Hong Kong to give her the information she needs to prove this turns out to be more difficult than expected.

Then there's Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a blogger (sorry, I mean freelance journalist), who is peddling his alternative remedy, which he claims will protect against the disease. He discourages people from taking the official vaccines (if and when they become available) and creates a vlog where he pretends he has been infected and then magically cured by his remedy. Then again, Ally Hextall clearly didn't watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes or was just too desperate to find a vaccine to worry about the limitations of n=1 trials. One monkey has been immunised against the disease by a particular variety of the vaccine so Ally injects herself with it; soon, we're watching lotteries determining the order in which people can be vaccinated so we're assuming the vaccine worked in humans too. Not exactly good science, though. Meanwhile, her boss Cheever looks like he will be in trouble, assuming that humanity does pull through; rumours are circulating on the internets (including on Krumwiede's blog) that Cheever gave his wife advance warning to get the hell out of Chicago and join him in Atlanta just before road blocks were set up. "I'd do it again," he said.

Soderbergh skips neatly from day to day of the epidemic and from character to character. Being an A-list celeb does not prevent you from meeting a grim death, convulsing on the floor and foaming at the mouth. But the film is far from emotional; in fact, it is a very detached, matter-of-fact telling of what could happen were we to find ourselves in the midst of such an epidemic. There is rioting, looting and a bit of panic, of course, particularly when people try to get their hands on food, Krumwiede's remedy and the vaccine, but Outbreak it ain't. It was, however, surprisingly compelling, although I was almost hoping we might get the drama of the virus mutating and Mitch suddenly discovering he isn't immune any more.

Ultimately, we discover that the virus emerged through some bat-pig interaction out in China, and was eventually transmitted to Beth's grubby little mitts. So it was a little unsettling that before the film there was an advert for the Natural Confectionery Company's modular Guzzle Puzzle sweets, which encourage you to combine flavours to create even more flavours. Mash-ups are good, they suggest, as they whip out a cat-donkey hybrid, which they call a catonkey. Kids, don't let your cat play with your donkey because that is how Crazy Bad Viruses are created.

LoFiFest 2011 Part V

And so another year of the London Film Festival is over--for me, at least, as there is still a whole day of movies still to go, including the closing night gala, Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea. But last night's gala screening of Roland Emmerich's new film Anonymous was my last LoFiFest film of the year. "There won't be any explosions," Emmerich, who has previously directed the likes of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, assured us before the screening last night. Actually, though, where would a historical romp through Shakespeare's London without a few hundred peasants being blasted with canons on Tower Bridge? As well as Emmerich's appearance, we were also graced by the presence of Joely Richardson, Rhys Ifans and some of the younger lads in the cast (most of whom, I was relieved to discover, are actually about my age).

Roland Emmerich and some of the Anonymous cast

Anonymous advances the theory that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (played by Rhys Ifans and Jamie Campbell Bower), who was far too noble to let the world think that someone from a family as old as his could possibly indulge in such a lowly art as play writing. He tries to persuade then struggling playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) to claim ownership of the plays but proud Jonson claims their styles are too different and refuses. Luckily, a raucous actor by the name of Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) is more than happy to say he wrote the plays and be paid handsomely for his silence.

But Anonymous is as much a story of Elizabeth I's relationships with some of the most important statesmen and nobles of the second half of the 16th century as it is Shakespeare in Love: The True Story. Clever casting sees Joely Richardson playing the younger queen, who meets a pre-pubescent Oxford after watching a performance of one of his plays (which bears a striking resemblance to A Midsummer Night's Dream) and, according to the movie, later becomes his lover. Vanessa Redrgave, meanwhile, plays the older Elizabeth--ageing, worried about the succession but refusing to name an heir, and fed up of being manipulated. William Cecil (David Thewlis) has always been one of her most loyal advisors but he and his son Robert (Edward Hogg) are falling out of favour as the queen fawns over her new favourite, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), who happens to be the step-son of Robert Dudley, her close buddy and would-be (or perhaps could-have-been) lover. Essex is also the eponymous Essex of the Essex Rebellion, although in Anonymous, the Cecils are the politically ruthless baddies, while Essex's so-called rebellion was manufactured by the Cecils, with a little accidental help from Oxford.

I went into the film thinking it would be a bit like a hybrid of Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and the star-studded British cast and often romping rhythms did sometimes make it feel like the former, although it wasn't anywhere near as funny. That isn't necessarily a bad thing and the scenes with Rafe Spall, still in Ian mode, certainly received a good deal of laughs, but I did think the script would have benefitted from a dash more lightness and wit. I also wish they'd let Ben Affleck reprise his role as rich would-be actor Ned Alleyn. Well, almost. Even for an alternative history, which could, of course, be true or have elements of truth to it, Anonymous made even The Tudors look historically accurate, but for once I don't mind too much about that, especially because although I know a lot about the Tudors, my knowledge is focused around the years from 1485 to 1587 or so.

I intended not to read any reviews before writing this post but I accidentally read Time Out London's analysis, which called Anonymous "a high-end Christmas panto, as a red-faced, enthusiastic cast are put through the paces by their barking, domineering director." Which is a fair summary, really.

LoFiFest 2011 Part IV

Tonight was finally the night of the surprise film at the London Film Festival. I've already complained a lot about the disappointment of last year's dull Brighton Rock remake and 2009's Capitalism: A Sermon and I had considered not going this year. But then I heard it was Sandra Hebron's last year as LFF artistic director this year and I thought she would try to make it a good one. Anyway, I bought my ticket but to try to minimise my disappointment, I had been staying away from blogs and discussions speculating on the surprise film, although this afternoon I caved and did a little bit of googling. This post suggested ten possible films, of which four (Moneyball, The Rum Diary, My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady) would have pleased me, five would have been fine and only one (The Muppets) would have been a fail as epic as the 2009 and 2010 surprise films.

I opted for the 8.30 screening rather than the 8.15--although this means that you find out the surprise later than the others (I wasn't checking Twitter after 8.15), if, on the off chance, the director and/or cast come along, you're more likely to get a Q&A session after the movie if you attend the later screening. This meant that while I waited for the film to start, I was worried some smart arse was going to loudly tell everyone what the film was but fortunately no one did. Finally, Sandra Hebron came on to introduce the film. She asked the audience to guess what it might be and most people suggested movies that were listed in the blog post to which I linked above. One person got it right, apparently, but Hebron warned us that anyone who knew her taste in films would know it wouldn't be anything obvious (although No Country for Old Men and The Wrestler are recent examples of surprise films that were also "big" films). She also added that some people would probably hate it but she encouraged everyone to give it a chance.

And the surprise film was... Damsels in Distress, which was one of the guesses made by I-flicks.net. With DiD, I think Hebron finally got it right: it was funny and sweet but also very quirky--often downright peculiar, in fact--so perfect Sunday night fodder and, perhaps, something I wouldn't necessarily have gone out of my way to see based on a synopsis. 

It's a little hard to describe the film, but it's about a group of pretty, pastel-loving, Anthro-wearing girls at the fictional Sevenoaks College, who are trying to make the world a better--and more fragrant--place by providing "transformational" soap to smelly frat boys (Romans, in this movie not Greeks) and running the campus suicide prevention centre (where the main therapy is tap dancing). Led by Violet (Greta Gerwig), they take transfer student Lily (Analeigh Tipton) under their wing, although she would rather hang out with her French friend Xavier (Hugo Becker, AKA Blair Waldorf's Prince Louis of Monaco). Violet and the other girls, Rose and Heather, are concerned about the fact Xavier has a girlfriend but worry even more when Lily is chatted up by Charlie (Adam Brody, AKA Seth Cohen), whom Rose dismisses as a "playboy or operator" about 20 times during the film.

Not a lot really happens other than standard, everyday college student stuff: fun is had at the Roman Holidays (Sevenoaks' equivalent of Greek Week); the girls meet guys; Violet splits up from her not-attractive not-intelligent boyfriend and becomes depressed; the girls try to start a new dance movement;  they muse on the correct plural of doofus; and they hand out a lot of soap. Violet, Heather and Rose all speak as though they have fallen out of a 1950s sit-com, with some very old-fashioned ideas about life and relationships; Megalyn Echikunwoke in particular, manages to make Rose's "playboy or operator" (emphasis on the last syllable) mantra hilarious every time she says it. The pink, 1950s-style title cards, which list "the damsels" on one card and, I think, the guys on another, made me think this was going to be some post-ironic, Grease meets Heathers parody and that the characters were going to burst into song any second. Fortunately for me, the only song-and-dance sequence came towards the end.

Hebron was right when she said that not everyone will like Damsels in Distress but I enjoyed it a great deal--many of the audience members, including several guys, would have five-minute fits of laughter, which was quite annoying but a good sign of a popular film. I wouldn't quite say that all is forgiven for the previous two surprise films, but I have regained some of my faith in the concept and I will enjoy seeing what Hebron's successor picks next year.

Cocktails and Cappuccinos

Emerald Street, daily emails from the makers of freebie chick mag Stylist, aimed at London ladies, have a regular feature called Cocktails & Cappuccinos, where they highlight a cool espresso bar, cocktail bar or restaurant--usually places that have been featured in Time Out, the Londonist, Daily Candy or Le Cool several weeks or months earlier. As I rarely drink cappuccinos these days, Macchiatos and Mojitos might have been a more appropriate title for this post but the cocktails in question are from the kind of bar where ordering a mojito would be perceived as unimaginative.

I went to the original Experimental Cocktail Club in Paris with Monsieur Exquisite in 2009 and loved the cocktails and the whole secret speakeasy experience. A few months ago, they opened a branch in London--in Gerrard Street in Chinatown, of all places--but I hadn't had the chance to check it out until last night. Although the website mentions that they keep 50% of their covers for walk-ins, I thought it would be busy and emailed over a week in advance to book. By Thursday, I had received no response; I emailed again (they have no phone number), this didn't elicit a reply either. Comments on Time Out suggested great cocktails made up for rude staff so Balham Babe, Marylebone Mate and I decided to try anyway. As is the norm with these speakeasies, there is no sign for the ECC--just a battered-looking door with a grumpy-looking bouncer. BB got there early and talked her way in but the bouncer was pretty arsey about letting me in to join her (he must not like pink heels). He eventually caved, although couldn't promise MM would be admitted.

For the next 90 minutes or so, BB and I were shunted around the seating areas to make room for people with bookings. I told the waitress I had tried to book, emailing over a week ago, but she claimed they got so many emails that they couldn't process them all in time. Fair enough, I thought. The place was, in any case, very cool: a townhouse decorated in an understated style and with a great bar. The cocktails were also excellent. My favourite was the Saint Germain des Prés, which involved, among other things, gin, St Germain liqueur, lime juice, egg white, cucumber. The Get Buck in Here, my first order, with gin, lemon juice, absinthe, ginger ale and grapefruit zest, was also very tasty. We warmed to the place, despite our inferior status as "walk-ins," and eventually, we were able to sit in a corner area, where we could relax a little more. Annoyingly, the people who vacated the area told us we'd been bullshitted about the email bookings, though; they had emailed at 3 pm that day and got a response right away. Apparently having "director" in your signature block helps, so maybe I'll email from my work address and give myself an Adam Werritty-style promotion. The waitress was subsequently apologetic about the lack of emails and about the fact we kept getting moved but perhaps she wanted an even bigger tip than the the discretionary 12.5%. Not cool, ECC.

As for the caffeine part of this post, I visited another place that's been on my to-do list for a while: The Sensory Lab, a quality espresso bar on Wigmore Street, perfectly placed between my flat and Selfridges. They serve coffee roasted by St Ali (which is part of the same group) as well as a variety of specialist brews of the week. My macchiato was suitably rich and chocolatey and I'm looking forward to trying some St Ali coffee in my French press next week. 

The Sensory Lab itself is very small, with only a few seats, but it's a great place for some quality, post-shopping caffeine--it's just far away enough from Oxford Street to mean it isn't usually overly packed. Plus, unlike certain other places mentioned in this post, the staff were really friendly and helpful. Oh, and another plus: like Yo! Sushi, they have still and sparkling water on tap; unlike Yo! Sushi, it's free!

Mommie Dearest — We Need To Talk About Kevin Review

There is, perhaps, even more red in Lynne Ramsay's new film We Need to Talk About Kevin than in The Sixth Sense. There is red in every scene and almost every shot: strawberry jam oozing out of a sandwich; the flashing red lights of a crime scene; red clothes; red furniture; red paint. Unlike in The Sixth Sense, however, the red symbolizes guilt and ghosts from the past rather than [spoiler alert] ghosts of Bruce Willis and Keira Knightley.

We Need to talk About Kevin is an uneasy, uncomfortable film, riddled with the most irritating noises: shrieking babies, honking cars, lawnmowers, drilling, scraping nails. It is also uncomfortable because as in Lionel Shriver's book of the same name, on which the movie is based, there is an awful sense of foreboding. Something terrible has happened but at first, we don't know what. And we don't fully understand the extent of the Bad Thing until the film's ending.

In the book, Eva (played by Tilda Swinton in the movie) is writing letters to her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) from whom she is clearly estranged. In the letters, she reflects back on the formative years of their now teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller) and because Eva is pretty self-involved, how much of Kevin's later choices are a reflection of her own parenting. In the movie, this is depicted through Eva's flashbacks, allowing for some potential unreliable narration, while she goes about a solitary existence, drinking red wine alone in her house, and shunned by others--middle-aged women smash her eggs in the supermarket and slap her in the street. Her house and car have been splattered with red paint and she spends a lot of the movie desperately trying to scrub away the paint from her house and her skin. The paint is, of course, a thinly veiled metaphor for her guilt.

In the flashbacks, we witness Kevin's difficult birth (the book makes more of a point of Eva's successful career as a travel book publisher, who loves her frequent adventures abroad and who resents having to give some of this up in order to bring up her son), and even more difficult childhood. He never stops screaming, he can talk but refuses to, and is clearly very intelligent but won't respond to Eva's attempts to draw him out. With his father, on the other hand, Kevin behaves much better, leaving Franklin (and us, given these flashbacks are from Eva's perspective) wondering how much of this is in Eva's head. When Kevin is about eight, Eva has a second child--a daughter, Celia, conceived without Franklin's knowledge. Less intelligent than Kevin but pretty, sweet and loving, Celia is the kind of child Eva wanted all along, but Eva's devotion to her daughter isolates her further from both her husband and her son.

Eva comes across as more sympathetic in the film than in the book, where she is very self-centred and overly ambitious. This is probably due, in part, to Swinton's sensitive, powerful portrayal but the fact that we, the audience, are so constantly exposed to the maddening noises like the screaming and the drilling, that we can understand what Eva is going through with Kevin--and how sleep-deprived she becomes. An incident in Kevin's childhood, when he is maybe seven or eight, only adds to Kevin's power over his mother and his ability to torment her. And although at the end of the film, when Eva asks him why he did what he did, he says he isn't really sure any more, we know that he did it all as revenge on the mother he has always hated--or whom, he perceives, has never loved him. Ultimately, through reliving the past, Eva is able to achieve some sense of catharsis, but it seems that despite her attempts to purge her guilt and gain absolution, she can't forgive herself or her son and she definitely can't forget.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a jarring, bleak film but it's also a fascinating portrait of a woman--a mother--in crisis. There is nothing light about it and songs that would normally be light-hearted, like Buddy Holly's Everyday and Wham's Last Christmas--only feel more unsettling, in context. Swinton is brilliant, as she often is, and Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin was wonderfully menacing. Go and see it--but not if you're going on a date or, for that matter, if you want to have kids.

LoFiFest 2011 Part III

Last night's screening can be described as a great film but with a somewhat disappointing celebrity-spotting and photographing opportunity. Tonight, I took Maman--a huge George Clooney fan--to the premiere of The Descendants and the pressure was on. Although I thought it was highly likely he would show up tonight too, there are no guarantees of these things at the London Film Festival. I had hoped to learn from last night's mistakes (mainly walking down the red carpet too early) but, of course, every screening is different.

George Clooney and the paparazzi

Leicester Square was quieter tonight so Maman and I were able to hang about at the start of the red carpet for a while, plotting our next move. Eventually, we started walking and soon, we were being hurried along by the security staff. Spotting a lot of flashes, I suddenly spotted George. I pulled out my camera and started taking photos but I didn't have the flash on and people kept getting in my way. We were almost at the doors but I quickly sneaked back and grabbed a few quick photos. As our seats were further forward tonight than last night, I also took some photos when Clooney, along with director Alexander Payne, a producer (whose name I didn't catch), and Shailene Woodley, who plays Clooney's daughter in the film, came on the stage to introduce the film. They talked briefly about how Clooney rarely plays a family man and Payne encouraged us all to forget about every other George Clooney film we've ever seen.

The only other Alexander Payne film I've seen is Sideways, which I liked and which shares certain similarities with The Descendants. They are both about journeys (metaphorical and real), they both end without too much resolution, and they are both homages to states (California in Sideways and Hawaii in The Descendants). Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer, whose wife Liz gets in a boating accident at the start of the film and ends up in a coma. Suddenly, he has to go from "back-up parent" to primary parent of his two daughters, ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alexandra (Woodley). He doesn't know his daughters very well and he definitely doesn't know how to help with them deal with their mother's precarious situation.

Sandra Hebron, Alexander Payne, producer, Shailene
Woodley and George Clooney.

To complicate matters, Liz has a provision in her will that means her life support machine must be turned off a certain period after doctors have decided there is no hope, so Matt has to break the bad news to all their friends and family to allow them all to say their last goodbyes. Alex insists that her friend Sid (Nick Krause) come with them on all these visits and trips; initially, Matt sees him as a wastrel stoner but later comes to appreciate Sid's support of Alex and even his sometimes too blunt, teenage boy world view. To complicate matters even further, Matt's ancestors owned a large chunk of land on another Hawaiian island, of which he shares ownership with assorted cousins. He, though, as the lawyer, is the only trustee and so the only one who can authorise the sale of the land but when he finds out who might benefit from the proposed sale, he isn't so sure he wants to go ahead.

Although much of the subject matter of The Descendants is pretty sad, like Sideways, it managed to feel quite upbeat and positive overall. When you think of Hawaii, you think of sunshine, flowers and beaches, but there are only a couple of beach scenes in The Descendants, and the sun only shines in the last few minutes of the film. Clooney, of course, made a great family man, and Woodley (who, in her perilous five-inch heels tonight, was nearly the same height as Clooney as he escorted her onto the stage) was strong as the angry and hurting Alex. I have a feeling this film may do well when we reach the awards season next year.

LoFiFest 2011 Part II

At some of the premieres and gala screenings at the London Film Festival, once you've crossed the red carpet and made it to your seat, they show you live footage of the red carpet and interviews with some of the cast and crew while you wait. As we were watching George Clooney schmoozing hacks and fans at the premiere of The Ides of March this evening, the woman sitting near me said, "Come on, George, stop flirting and get in here. It's not all about you, you know." This turned out to be fairly accurate: he may have directed the movie, co-written the screenplay and even played one of the main characters, but The Ides of March really isn't all about George Caesar — I mean Clooney.

When asked on the red carpet by Edith Bowman to describe his character, Mike Morris, Clooney said: "Well, he's a governor who looks a lot like me. And he wants to be president." It is primary season and in the polls, Morris is comfortably ahead of his rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Senator Pullman. His senior campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and junior campaign manager Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) are quietly confident but not enough to tell cynical New York Times hack Ida (Marisa Tomei) that they have it in the bag. Meanwhile, Pullman's campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) spots Meyers' potential and attempts to seduce him onto the Pullman campaign, setting into motion a complex and ultimately tragic course of events, with pretty, young intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who gets involved with Meyers, as collateral.

Too far away... George in the middle

After watching Alan Cumming's Eli Gold in The Good Wife, it's hard for these guys live up to my expectations of campaign managers but Hoffman and Meyers, who have an interesting relationship and great banter, carry the film, which, after the first act, is largely devoid of Clooney. Meyers likes working for Hoffman because they're friends and he likes working on the Morris campaign because he believes in Morris and likes what he stands for. He'll never compromise on that, he tells Duffy. He can represent any cause as long as he believes in it. So we all know that Meyers is going to have to do exactly that: compromise on his ideals to achieve ambition, at the expense of his integrity. "I'm not sure I want to tie myself to you for the next eight years," Morris tells him at one point. "Four years," Meyers corrects, "don't get ahead of yourself." This is exchange is a sign of just one of the many changes in power between the characters during the course of the film.

Guess the stars: Sandra Hebron, George Clooney, Beau Willimon, Evan Rachel Wood, Philip Seymour Hoffman

I have, as ever, tried to avoid reading reviews of the film before writing this post but the impression I get is that people think The Ides of March is a good film but it could have been a great one. I imagine some will complain that it is too stagey (it is based on the Beau Willimon play Farragut North) but I disagree. It is a tightly edited, well-acted political drama about power, trust, ambition and betrayal. Ryan Gosling goes some way to proving he can carry a film, although he has strong support from Hoffman, whose Zara is very savvy and very good at his job but knows that eventually, he'll leave politics and walk into a cushy consultancy job. It is very much a boys' film — the two main female characters, Ida and Molly, are fairly two-dimensional: cynical journalist, ambitious-but-naive intern. And Clooney, of course, charms as Morris, saying the right things, appealing to the right people, and yet still doing the very human thing of messing up royally.

Anticipation and Pleasure, Episode 94

I wanted pose a question from my non-pseudonymous Twitter account earlier, in response to Julian Barnes finally winning the Booker Prize this year: "Now that he's won the Booker Prize, is the pleasure of anticipation still the most reliable form of pleasure for Julian Barnes, as well as for Flaubert?" This was, of course, longer than 140 characters. The other problem was that my blog post on tracking down the quotation about anticipation and pleasure in Barnes' book Flaubert's Parrot comes at the top or close to the top on Google searches for various combinations of pleasure + anticipation + reliable + purest + Flaubert + Barnes. And for now, I try to avoid directly pointing my non-pseudonymous Twitter followers directly to my still mostly pseudonymous blog.

My Barnes experiences have been mixed: I loved A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, quite liked Talking It Over and Love, Etc. (in the case of the latter, mainly because of the title, which I use as a tag), and didn't really get into Flaubert's Parrot. I'll probably cast an eye over his new novel, The Sense of an Ending, however. Not because I'm a Booker whore but because none of his works after Love, Etc. appealed to me much and so I hadn't even bothered to find out what this new one is about. I expect there are plenty of Booker whores in Marylebone, though, so I'll probably have a long wait at my library.

As for the quotation, it was a Dawson's Creek professor who coined the expression "anticipation is the purest form of pleasure...and the most reliable," referencing Flaubert's Une Education Sentimentale. But the DC writers plagiarised paraphrased this from Flaubert's Parrot, in which Barnes writes, "Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?" And Flaubert himself wasn't anywhere near as concise; he just waffles on and doesn't mention anticipation or pleasure.

Rose-Tinted Glasses

So, it seems, The Stone Roses are re-forming (isn't everyone these days?). The Roses often in feature in lists of my favourite music--top ten songs, favourite album covers, and sometimes even favourite bands. Let's be clear, though, I only started listening to their music a good three years after they broke up and nearly a decade after their eponymous first album, which is also their penultimate album and, let's face it, their only great album. Even then, it was only when The Stone Roses was introduced into the eight-CD rotation at the Sandwich Shop of Dreams for a year or so that I really started to appreciate them. I like every song on The Stone Roses and, unusually for me--a fickle, singles listener--I often listen to it as an album. I Wanna Be Adored is, of course, my favourite song on the album; I'm no music critic and the video clip below, which I must have downloaded years ago and lovingly saved onto my portable hard drive, probably sums it up best. I Am the Resurrection, with its awesome drum solo, comes a close second.

As for The Second Coming, the only stand-out song for me is Ten-Storey Love Song and even that isn't as good as almost all of the songs on The Stone Roses. As for their even earlier work, in early drafts of my novel, one of the characters shows her commitment to another character by tracking down a 12" white label edition of the Roses' first single, So Young (I assume that at the time I wrote this, I researched it adequately and found that such a disc would indeed be hard to acquire). He thinks she wanted to reflect on one of the song's repeated lyrics, "Where there's a will there's a way."

My liking of and emotional history with the band aside, am I glad that they're back together? I'm not sure yet. I love Manchester indie music from the '80s and '90s as much as the next person--more than most, in fact--and yes, they've probably moved on from their last, disastrous performance at the Reading Festival in 1996. But the more albums Oasis pumped out after 1997, the less I liked their music overall, and I worry that the Stone Roses and their debut album could be further tarnished in my mind. For now, though, I'll wait until I hear the re-formed band before passing further judgement.

Songs of Praise

When I was picking the films I wanted to watch at the London Film Festival, I only had a 20-minute window  before the members' booking opened and, as such, I was doing it quite quickly. So much so that I saw the title of Miss Bala, assumed it was about a would-be beauty queen in mid-Wales, and skipped right over it. Today, though, I saw the trailer for Miss Bala and realised I completely mis-judged the film, not least because it is about a young woman in Mexico whose dreams of becoming Miss Baja California (I'm not sure why the film is called Miss Bala not Miss Baja; it may be explained in the movie) are interrupted by gangsters, murder, kidnapping and drugs, and other happy things.

From the trailer, it looks like an interesting and powerful thriller and I'm sad that two of the LoFiFest screenings clash with the two George Clooney films I'm going to see and the other is fully booked. I guess I'll just have to wait until it goes on general release at the end of the month.

Perhaps, though, I'm judging a movie too much by the soundtrack of its trailer because I really like the song used in the second half of the trailer. It has a very similar sound to Bat for Lashes and Florence + the Machine, both of whom I like a lot, but it's by an artist called Saint Saviour and the track is called This Ain't No Hymn. I downloaded it this afternoon and I've been listening to it a lot. I'm sure Morgan Spurlock's neuro-marketing expert would have something to say about how the song is bouncing off my amygdala and making me want to see the movie I associate with the song even more. There was also a free download of a song called Hurricanes on Saint Saviour's website, which is also good, although doesn't have the same effect on me as This Ain't No Hymn.

The Greatest Documentary I've Ever Watched (This Month)

Somehow, I find Morgan Spurlock documentaries much less annoying than those made by Michael Moore, although that said, the only of Spurlock's films I had seen previously was Super Size Me, and I'm more biased against Moore after having him foisted upon me as the surprise film at the 2009 London Film Festival. Anyway, having done wonders for the reputation of McDonald's in Super Size Me, Spurlock is now turning his hand to the issue of product placement in movies. And of course, being Morgan Spurlock, he does this by making a documentary about product placement, which is funded entirely through product placement. The result is The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, or to give it its full title, Pom Wonderful Presents...The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

After a brief introduction, illustrating how advertising is impinging upon most aspects of our lives and that we don't always--or even often--realise that it is happening, Spurlock makes a start on the task of finding sponsors for the film. From the offset, the film is very meta: his discussions with brand managers about how their product would appear in the film end up being the main body of the film, and, towards the end, Spurlock is being interviewed on a US talk show about the film, which would apparently be released in the US later that week (I assume this bit was actually pre-recorded because otherwise, I'm not sure there would be enough time to edit the clip into the film). Naturally, a lot of the big brands he first approaches aren't interested; they saw what he did to McDo and don't want to be stitched up in the same way.

But before too long, Spurlock manages to sign up about 12 sponsors, including lead sponsor Pom Wonderful, whose name appears in the movie title and who get a 30-second commercial starring Spurlock woven seamlessly (well, almost seamlessly) into the movie. Also on board are a hotel chain, a low-cost airline, a chain of gas stations, and the makers of Mane and Tail--shampoo that can be used by humans and horses. Spurlock apparently comes across the latter brand in a drug store and is wildly amused but Mane and Tail's approach may be more tongue in cheek than it initially appears because they seem to get a lot of product placement and co-branding requests and they make a point of never paying for this (a note at the end of the film explains that they didn't pay to appear in the film, and yet we get to see Spurlock's idea for a commercial involving him, his son and a Shetland pony in a bath played out within the documentary).

Along the way, Spurlock interviews various people from Noam Chomsky (with his linguistics hat on) and Ralph Nader, to Quentin Tarantino and a neuro-marketing expert. The latter helps Spurlock with his trailer by putting him in an MRI scanner and analysing which version of the trailer causes the best combination of brain areas to light up. As for Tarantino, he complains that Denny's never wanted to pay for their restaurants to appear in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction; the director of Rush Hour, is just pragmatic: the money has to come from somewhere. A few examples of incongruous verbal product placement in TV shows are given, which makes me think of Gossip Girl, which is or was sponsored by Bing, and so every few episodes, a character would say, "Just Bing it," which, of course, no one says in real life, much as Microsoft would like them to.

The main difference between Spurlock and Moore, I think, is that Spurlock likes to inform and entertain, whereas Moore seems to prefer to preach. Of course Spurlock wants to be provocative and to evoke a reaction, but while I came out of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold chuckling, after the end of Capitalism: A Love Story, I had had more than enough of Moore's ranty invectives. And for me, informative entertainment is what I want from a documentary, so round two definitely goes to Spurlock.

On a related note, the movie poster, pictured above, really reminds me of the anti-hero in Charles McLeod's American Weather, who comes up with the genius idea of live broadcasting death-row executions on national TV and selling advertising space on the prisoners' bodies. This book makes a nice, darkly satirical companion to The Greatest Movie Ever Sold...

Of Absence and Hearts

How quickly the 2011 London Film Festival has rolled around; it feels like only weeks ago that I was complaining about last year's surprise film (oh yes, that's because it was only weeks ago!). Each year at the festival, I like to go to at least one film that isn't one of the box-office-topping movies with an all-star-cast and this year, I picked Drake Doremus's film Like Crazy, which isn't a very edgy choice given the film's prizes at Sundance but it's no Ides of March either. Tonight was also the film's European première so the red carpet was rolled out and the charming Doremus and his beautiful female lead, Felicity Jones, came along to introduce the film and to answer some audience questions.

Drake Doremus and Felicity Jones

For me, Like Crazy is all about how fragile love is and how easy it to go from making custom Moleskines for each other and frolicking on the Santa Monica pier to being stuck 5,000 miles apart, trying to get on with your own life but knowing that the more you do this, the more removed you will feel from the other person. Maybe that's just because I've been in a bleak mood today. Jones plays Anna, an English student studying in LA who, during her last semester there, falls in love with Jacob (Anton Yelchin). They've never felt this way about anyone else before and all they want to do is stay in bed all day, drink whiskey and, well, enjoy each other's company. This section takes about 15 minutes and the rest of the film is spent with both of them doing everything they can to screw up their relationship. Their errors include (some spoilers follow):

1. Anna outstaying her student visa by several months and then wondering why she is denied access and permanently barred from the US after she returns to England for a wedding and then tries to re-enter the US.
2. Deciding to break up because they don't want to see their relationship die away but then not sticking to the decision, getting back together on several occasions, and messing around various lovers/live-in-architectural-assistants in the process.
3. After exhausting the immigration appeals process, they decide to get married and spend approximately 15 seconds in bed, happily drinking champagne, before we cut to the next scene in which they are told that Anna can't get a marriage visa until the issues with her student visa are resolved, and they soon descend into sniping, shouting, text spying and all of those other Bad Signs.

The film was beautifully shot on a still camera, which had a very intimate feel. Alex Kingston and Olivier Muirhead provided some nice comedy moments playing Anna's whiskey-drinking, bread-baking, Balderdash-playing parents and Jones was very good, managing to portray Anna's agonies, ecstasies and agonising decisions. I was less convinced by Yelchin's Jacob; I didn't really believe in him as Anna's True Love. I definitely didn't buy into her English bloke, Simon, who is healthy and kind and extremely dull but I wasn't convinced that Jacob was much better. During the film--which has an interesting temporal structure, with uneven gaps between scenes, sometimes lasting months--both Anna and Jacob progress in their careers--she as a Devil Wears Prada-style assistant who eventually becomes an editor, and he running his own furniture design company, making the stakes for being together even higher.

Anna and Jacob's problem, as Felicity Jones put it after the screening, was that they mythologised their relationship too much at the beginning. They figured that because they had the hearts-and-flowers, everything else--the practicalities and the day-to-day--would follow. I wondered at several times during the movie whether certain scenes were improvised and it turns out that the film was entirely unscripted. The dialogue felt natural, real and, often, raw. As for the ending, it is ambiguous. Doremus asked the audience what we thought happened and we turned out to be a pessimistic lot. He did, however, say that the ending is also a beginning, or, rather, that the ending captures the relationship at just one moment that isn't any more special than the other moments they have had.

Jones, who formerly played Emma Grundy née Carter in The Archers, was recruited by Doremus via Facebook and as part of her audition, she made her own version of one of the key scenes in the movie--where Anna and Jacob are taking a shower--by herself, of course. So when a teenage audience member asked for tips on breaking into acting, Doremus suggested, "Shoot yourself in the shower," which really didn't sound inappropriate in context. He was still, sensibly perhaps, very quick to correct himself. I didn't ask any questions this time, but I thought about asking Jones what it was like going from Ed Grundy to this Jacob guy.

Mean Girls, 1962 Edition

I read Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help earlier this year, during a phase when I had run out of books I wanted to read in my local library. I didn't pick up the book before because based on a quick glance at the original UK cover, I assumed it was a book about maids in Victorian England; ironically, it turns out that I didn't perceive or notice the colour of the maids' skin. When I did finally read the book, I liked it--more than I liked its predecessor, Gone with the Wind.

It is the early 1960s and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a recent college graduate who has just returned to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. She wants to be a novellist--or, at least, a journalist--but settles for writing a cleaning advice column for the local rag. Even this is too much for her pushy mother Charlotte and for her bitchy friends--Hilly the Queen Bee, Elizabeth (the Karen Smith of the book), et al--who just want her to get married, have lots kids and go with the flow. But taking advice from her failed application to work at a New York publisher, Skeeter decides to write about what she feels passionately about, which, it turns out, is telling the story of the black maids who raised them all and whom her friends continue to employ to raise their own children.

Abileen works for Elizabeth and has raised dozens of white children but her only son died tragically young. She'd often dreamed of a world where she can be a writer and so she is the first maid Skeeter signs up to write about her experiences. Abileen soon recruits her best friend Minny, who worked for Hilly's family until Hilly fired her, overtly on trumped-up charges of theft but really because Minny used Hilly's bathroom rather than the designated bathroom for the help. Along the way, Skeeter must face her own demons with her mother and her friends and find out what really happened to her own beloved maid, Constantine, who disappeared suddenly while she was at college.

The movie was pretty faithful to the book; at about 2h30, it was also longer than it needed to be but this annoyed me more because of the lazy editing rather than because it was boring. The stand-out performance was from Octavia Spencer, who stole every scene as the sassy Minny, although Allison Janney's flawed but ultimately well-meaning Charlotte Phelan was also great. Jessica Chastain was barely recognisable from The Tree of Life as Celia Foote, a "white trash" girl who has married Hilly's ex and who is ostracised by the mean girls; it felt like she was trying a little too hard in a role that became caricaturish all too easily. Oh, and I totally didn't recognise Sissy Spacek as Missus Walters, Hilly's mother, who has dementia and who is placed in a nursing home by Hilly after she laughs at the revenge Minny takes on Hilly; Missus Walters definitely had the funniest lines.

Overall, I thought it was a good enough movie; the decent casting generally made up for the baggy script and some of the clichés. I'm not sure it is exactly a feel-good movie, although in the girls' loos, that seemed to be what people were saying.

It may be a little unfair on The Help to say this but the best part of the screening was the box of deluxe Dermalogica samples that were being handed out. I've been wanting to check out some Dermalogica products because of Being Dena's praise for them and now I get to try several, including a cleanser and a moisturiser. Although my ticket to see The Help was free, I had been debating whether to go or not, given that I had to go from work to Waterloo and then back up to the Finchley Road for the screening. Now, I'm definitely glad I went.

Homecoming

Friday was my parents' wedding anniversary and although I told them I didn't want to cramp their style, they insisted that I join them for dinner at Jamie's in Oxford. Of course, I soon realised that my main role was as their designated driver but as I was still suffering from the tail end of a cold, I didn't really mind. Jamie's was good, as ever, although perhaps worrying that there was no queue on a Friday night in term time. Oh, and the waitress's use of the "really nice" about six times during her description of each special grated somewhat but as she was able to secure the lamb special for Maman, after telling her it had suddenly sold out, did win her brownie points. I just had a brownie, described as the "ultimate" brownie but it was neither my last nor my best. It was "really nice" but with raspberries and amaretti and a more cake-like consistency, not my usual brownie preference.

Yesterday, after a perhaps ill-advised morning run around Christ Church meadow and some espresso from Oxford's most reliable purveyor of caffeine, The Missing Bean, I borrowed Papa's car and drove into Oxford to meet Lost in Translation for lunch at Mission Burrito. Oxford too, it seems, has jumped on the growing trend for Mexican eateries in the UK. Mission was good--the burritos were tasty and filling and the loud, privileged chatter of Oxford students gave the place some energy. I wasn't quite ready to give the Beamer back yet though so I decided to drive to Bicester Village. Sadly, the main shop I wanted to visit--Theory--had gone and I didn't buy anything. It was nice to be back behind a steering wheel again though.

Today, Maman and I were on a pilgrimage to the Pays Noir. We had mediocre pub grub with Maman's father in Pelsall (my scampi and chips were fine, even if they probably came out of the freezer) and then we went to visit Papa's parents. I could have done with a quieter weekend, really, to see off my cold but fun was definitely had.

This Week I've Been Mostly Reading...

...girl books. I try to motivate myself to read long and/or non-fiction books by allowing myself to read something a little lighter in between, as a reward. So over the past week (well, fortnight, really), I've read these books:

1. The First Wife
After finishing Tim Harford's latest book Adapt (for which I spent four months on my library's waiting list), which I enjoyed but not as much as his earlier books (it ended up being rather repetitive and there were too many military examples for my liking), I treated myself to a psy-chick-ological thriller, in the form of The First Wife by Emily Barr, which was recommended either in Stylist or the Grauniad.

The story is thus: Lily was raised by her grandparents after her parents decided they couldn't be bothered to be parents and skipped the country and her upbringing sounds rather off, with very little socialisation and almost no modern technology. After her grandparents die and she is left penniless, she gets a job as a cleaner for an attractive, quasi-famous couple. She falls for the husband but after his wife dies in mysterious circumstances in Spain and Lily appears to be on her way to becoming the second wife, Lily realises that nothing is as it seems. Some of the quoted reviews on the cover suggest comparisons with Don't Look Now and Rebecca are warranted. I'm not sure these are quite merited but The First Wife is a solid, haunting page-turner of a psychological thriller and Lily's naive and often elusive or secretive story-telling did even remind me a little of Never Let Me Go, at times.

2. Wild Swans
Next on my list was Wild Swans (non-fiction and long), which I've been meaning to read for years--since I was at school, at least, as I remember starting to read it on several occasions during free periods but never getting very far. More recently, I had hoped to take it out of my local library but the copy seemed to have been missing for several years. This week, though, they finally had a new copy and I pounced. Wild Swans tells the true story of three generations of Jung Chang's family. Her grandmother had her feet bound and was married off as the concubine of a rich warlord, who spent just enough time to impregnate her before dying, allowing her to marry for love--a much older doctor. Their daughter, Jung's mother, rose through the ranks of the Communist party, marrying a fellow Communist official and painfully giving birth to several children including Jung. After her father criticises Mao, Jung's parents are tortured and she is exiled before eventually winning a place at university and, finally, winning a scholarship to an English university and escaping China. It's a powerful book, packing in huge amounts of the history of China during the 20th century, the upheavals and revolutions, the famines and the constant reversals of fortunes. Chang is an evocative and informative narrator and I like the way the book combines personal history and the history of the country. Oh, and she studied linguistics, which is always nice to see!

3. The Lady of the Rivers
Interesting as Wild Swans was, I needed something lighter again and luckily, my library had just got the new Philippa Gregory book, The Lady of the Rivers, the latest in Gregory's Cousins Wars series, looking at the women of the 15th century who went on to become the wives and mothers of the Tudor kings. Previously in this series, Gregory has told the stories of Elizabeth Woodville (Edward IV's "Kate Middleton") and the foundress of St Jocks'; now, it is the turn of Elizabeth Woodville's mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Jacquetta is married to the Duke of Bedford--the English king's head honcho in France--at the age of 17, after a brief meeting with Joan of Arc (who thinks Jacquetta's gowns aren't very practical for riding).

According to Gregory, Bedford wants her for her Second Sight rather than her body but he soon dies, leaving Jacquetta with the hots for one of his men, a certain gentleman named Richard Woodville. Love matches, it seems, run in this family. I haven't read any further yet but it seems that Jacquetta's second marriage causes the family to fall from favour before they regain ascendancy; well, until her daughter Elizabeth's own marriage to Edward IV comes into question thanks to Jacquetta's alleged witchcraft. This book isn't very different from the other Cousins Wars titles but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm keen to bring my knowledge of 15th century England up to the level of my Tudor knowledge is an enjoyable way to go about it.

Next on my list:

• The Submission - Amy Waldman
• The Book of Lies - Mary Horlock
• Player One - Douglas Coupland

Parks and Recreation

The heat wave is still here in London and I've been trying to hang out outside but I did take a 95-minute cooling break in an air-conditioned cinema yesterday. I went to see Red State at the ToCoRo Odeon, which, unlike most other London Odeons, has relatively well-designed screens with no oddly angled rows or excessively bright emergency lighting.

I thought the film was OK but not great. Red State doesn't really have any heroes; just plenty of villains. Three high school boys in an unnamed red state really want to get laid and answer a post from a woman advertising her, er, services on a site that is "like Craig's List but for people who want to get f*ucked" ("I thought Craig's List was like Craig's List for people who want to get f*cked," one of the kids says in one of the few funny lines). They head out to her trailer and Melissa Leo appears, invites them in for beers, which turn out to be spiked with rohypnol. Next thing they know, the boys wake up in cages in the middle of a fundamentalist church run by Abin Cooper (seen earlier on the news with the rest of his family/cult picketing the funeral of a gay guy). And so begins the torture porn section of the film, which soon turns into a siege when John Goodman and assorted ATF agents show up, under orders to just kill everyone in Cooper's church/house to cover up the fact that the bureau had screwed up.

A statue of the eponymous Holland in Holland Park

Red State is an interesting film but I found it hard to like it very much. Not least because the limited sympathy you may feel for some of the characters soon evaporates as the movie suddenly deems them irrelevant and/or disposable. Part of the problem was that from the trailer, I got the impression it was a dark comedy, satirising everything from right-wing fundamentalists to incompetent government agency staff to teenage sex comedies. Actually, though, it isn't a dark comedy; it's just very dark. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but I had hoped for a few more laughs than the handful of half-hearted chuckles I got. The only other Kevin Smith films I've seen are Dogma, which I thought was OK, and Clerks, which I loved, partly because I first watched it while I was working at the Sandwich Shop of Dreams and it was all too realistic, and yet hilarious. I watched it so many times, at one stage, I knew large chunks of the script off by heart.

As for today, I ventured west and wandered through Notting Hill before settling down on a sunny bench in Holland Park. Although I often run through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, I'd never actually been to Holland Park before and I really liked it: it's big with plenty of woods, fountains, ponds, sitting areas and nicely manicured lawns, as well as giant chess boards and parks for small irritating people (but because this is Holland Park, the children are all well behaved). Basically, it's a very pleasant place to hang out with a book on a sunny Sunday.

Another Week, Another Burger

On the way to checking out Meatballs last month, I discovered that Exmouth Market is close enough to my office to make lunchtime trips a definite possibility. There are plenty of nice-looking restaurants, cafes and shops, including Morito (a runner up in Time Out's recent food and drink awards), Caravan, the excellent indie book shop Clerkenwell Tales, and the purveyor of pretty but not entirely practical bags Bagman and Robin.

There is also a cool little restaurant called Medcalf, a former butcher's, which serves a daily-changing menu of comfort food with plenty of good-quality meat options. After our trip to Meatballs, we had a wander up Exmouth Market and spotted a sign outside Medcalf announcing that the next Burger Smith would take place on 30 September. A little bit of online investigation suggested that this would involve BBQed burgers served out the back of Medcalf, next to the Spa Fields park. As I can never resist the temptation of a good burger, we went down to give it a try on Friday.

They certainly picked a great week for a BBQ as Friday was hot and sunny and Spa Fields was filled with students, presumably from City University, making the most of the sunshine. The BBQ itself was set up in the tiny outdoor section of Medcalf (which would be a lovely place to eat on a warm day) and the menu was: beef rib burger £4.50; cheese 50p. We ate our burgers in the park and they were good. Perhaps a little more well done than I would usually go for but the meat was tasty and juicy and then cheese--large chunks of very mature cheddar--was also delicious. And as you could add your own salad, mayo and sauces, I didn't have my usual problem of trying to explain that I really like my burger very plain (just the bun, cheese and a tiny bit of mayo).

The only problem was that the burger was so filling that I was too full to try one of the many gorgeous-looking cakes and pastries that were on sale on the market proper. Ah well; there is always next time. Well, unless there is another Burger Smith that day...