Film Haiku

replay the journey
try to solve the mystery
replay the journey


(a haiku review of Source Code)

This is an entry for the Best For Film Hollywood Haikus blogging competition. Enter now.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

The 2011 Edinburgh International Film Festival has unveiled a fresh programme mix for its 65th year. The festival is always a major cultural highlight of my year and this year is packed with screenings, new events, collaborations and innovative film experiences. The selection of films looks like the most exciting for the last several years at least.

The festival this year runs from 15 - 26 June and the programme includes:

• Thought-provoking ideas: screenings, debates and events that explore the power of film in topics such as conflict and science
• Experimental events: 24-hour debates, cinema recreations in public spaces, ‘Cineconcerts’ with live music, and live video game performances
• Distinctive collaborations: screening the film favourites of some of the most creative minds in film, music and the arts, plus partnerships with the pioneers of the film and digital world
• Cinema experiences: outdoor screenings, gallery exhibitions and a bike powered mobile cinema

It looks like it's going to be a brilliant festival so if you're in Edinburgh in June make sure you try to get along to some films!

The Luxury of Exile by Louis Buss

Claude Wooldridge is an antiques dealer and second hand bookshop owner with an obsession with Byron and an impending midlife crisis. When he finds what may be letters leading him to Byron's memoirs he thinks this may be something that will bring meaning left to his life. His profession means that he is acutely aware that the memoirs (and indeed the letter leading him to them) may be a fake and increasingly he is becoming aware that his whole life may be fake. So he rushes off to Naples and buys the old mansion that Byron is reputed to have lived in, where he can uncover the truth.

The part of the novel set in the UK is entertaining, Wooldridge is a colourful and not entirely likeable character and his dysfunctional family and professional life is described in an amusing and insightful manner. Secrets abound, which are revealed gradually through the narrative. Great use is made of the weather to accent mood (though this is perhaps overdone in one scene, where an argument is counterpointed by an ever increasing thunderstorm that becomes rather melodramatic).

However, once action moves to Naples, the book totally deteriorated for me. Rather than Italy acting as a backdrop for adventure, discovery and closure it is a setting for depressing introspection and self involved misery.

The Luxury of Exile by Louis Buss published by Random House

for the Italy in Books reading challenge

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

This is a fictionalised journal of the author's struggle with AIDS in the relatively early days of the disease (He died of AIDS in 1991.) It is profoundly moving with its meditation on the meaning of friendship and how illness affects friendships and other relationships. It makes an interesting point about AIDS despite its horrors and ravages in some senses being 'kind' because it gives the sufferer time to live the last of their life knowing that they don't have much time left and allowing them to make peace with things. Of course in lots of other ways it isn't at all a kind disease, as is made very clear by some parts of this book.

The book is beautifully written with some humour, making a poignant read. There is a lot of medical information in the book, but the quality of the writing means that this does not distract from the human elements of the narrative. The fact that it is a fictionalised journal does mean that the reader wonders about who some of the characters really are!


To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Herve Guibert published by High Risk

For the LGBT Reading Challenge

I won a copy of the Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica in the LGBT Reading Challenge, which I am currently reading and will review sometime fairly soon. As its short stories, it will be a while, as I read short stories a few at a time between novels.

Weekend Reflections

I've always wanted to take a photo of these reflections in the fireplace in one of our favourite cafes in Edinburgh, so today I did! I took a lot more photos today as we wandered round Craiglockhart Hill and Pond and the Union Canal. You can see those over on Crafty Green Poet here.

For Weekend Reflections

Titian - The Last Days by Mark Hudson

This book is a wonderful, though sometimes slightly confused, mix of travelogue, biography, art history and general history. The subtitle The Last Days is entirely misleading as it looks at most of Titian's life and a large proportion of his paintings and puts his work in context with the other developments in Venetial art at the time.

Large amounts of the narrative is spent detailing Titian's paintings, and where these paintings are shown in the colour plates in the centre of the book this is wonderful reading. I totally enjoyed discovering the depths to paintings that were being discribed to me as well as being available in front of my eyes. Some of the described paintings weren't available in the book though and these long descriptions became slightly tiresome as I wanted to have them in front of me, I'm not sure that the author should be expecting all readers to have a good visual memory for large numbers of paintings!

The book also went into a lot of detail about Titian's methods of working and how he had access to a large number of styles of painting, not to mention his assistants! I found it fascinating that often he would quiet blatantly adapt paintings by other artists, add his own background, paint the head of his model (or patron) onto the existing body and hey presto! another masterpiece! Not to mention the studio copies (mostly carried out by his assistants) of his own works.

There is also a lot of information about the art scene in Venice in the 1500s, the history of the times and the epidemics that periodically swept the city, including the 1576 plague which is believed to have killed Titian.

Added to all this, are a lot of discussions about eroticism in art. Many paintings of the period (including several by Titian himself) used naked people in suggestive poses, that were made respectable by the addition of a mythological tale. Titian seems to have been the first artist to have drawn a naked woman without this justification, and this painting The Venus of Urbino scandalised many people (Mark Twain reportedly described it as 'the obscenest picture the world possesses') while what we see is a beautiful young woman in a pose that is no more suggestive than the poses of many nymphs in many mythological paintings.

Interspered in all this are accounts of the author's travels round Venice in search of Titian's last home and round various art galleries and religious buildings in search of the artists paintings.

It's a totally fascinating book and a must read for anyone interested in art history or in the process of how artists work.

Titian - the Last Days by Mark Hudson, published by Bloomsbury

for Italy in Books

Dean Village Bridge

This is a bridge across the Water of Leith in Dean Village. It was built more or less at the point where the original ford crossed the river when Dean Village was first established as a settlement. You can see more of my photos of Dean Village on this blog here (and that post itself includes more links if you're really interested!).

I posted a photo of another bridge across the Water of Leith today over on Crafty Green Poet. You can see that here.

for Sunday Bridges

Six word story

Gunshots; then the alien spaceship appeared.

The Orangerie

We had a lovely walk through Dalkeith Country Park today. You can read more about it over on Crafty Green Poet here. This building is the Orangerie, built in the mid nineteenth century and currently being renovated.

St George's Well

St George's Well is the 'poor relation' to the much more elaborate St Bernard's Well along the Water of Leith.