Monday, December 17, 2007

Ravens and Birds

I went to see The Darjeeling Company at the weekend. It's basically about nice luggage and people with serious noses, and it features several toe-tapping tunes, some interesting nods to Satyajit Ray, and a good joke involving pepper spray.

It's prefaced by a short that stars Nathalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman. The film is probably meant to be, like, really deep and art school, but it's actually about how two people who are really bad at kissing are never, ever going to get it on. None of the reviews I've read have mentioned this (mostly because almost all film reviewers seem to be men, and they were probably too distracted by NP's lack of knickers to worry about what her mouth was doing), but it's like watching two people punch each other with their mouths, and not in a "ooh I haven't seen you for ages, hot damn I fancy you" way - more in a "yeah yeah I've watched people do this in films, how hard can it be? uh oh, it seems to be real difficult and far to hard for me to do properly" kind of way.

The other thing really wrong with the "romance" is that Jason Schwartzman keeps playing "Where do you go to my lovely", which is such a silly teenage wank song that it would put any right-thinking woman in a bad mood from the start. It oozes a sort of Adrian Mole-like sophistication.

Unrelatedly, I became a bit obsessed with Simon Raven today. I haven't actually read any of his books, but I'm sure that will be easy to remedy. Anyway, here's a bit from his Guardian obituary:

The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.

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