the flicker club film review:
I'm all for a Christmas movie but this year I just didn't think I could face It's a Wonderful Life again on Christmas Eve, so I hot footed it down to Fopp a few days before and hunted down a film I'd been meaning to see for a while. Here is my recommendation for the perfect film for the time of year- the brilliant Joyeux Noel.
Now I realise that Christmas is by now a distant memory of cheap tat and dirty snow but I'm confident that you can still watch this movie mid January to install that often lacking feeling of warmth to your fellow man.
Fundamentally the story of the Christmas Eve ceasefire among the trenches of WW1, subtitled in German and French it will have you crying like a cissy boy at the untold misery and horror of war. Do you see why I think it's such a perfect Christmas film for all the family.
If you're the sort of person whose already started your 2011 Christmas shopping then get out there, buy this film and tuck it away for next Christmas eve, if however you're the sort of person who now feels a bit sullied after the gratuitous excess of the last 2 weeks then settle back and immerse yourself in 2 hours of cinema at its finest,replenish your soul and give yourself a kick up the backside for moaning about the quality of the presents you received this year.(Not me-mine were all great, especially the book on 1930's Hillbilly Halloween masks. I kid you not it is brilliant).
Rejoice, Rejoice Christmas is over although obviously War is not. That's me doing poignant. Yikes.
Stephen for the flicker club
the flicker club art exhibition:
until the 11 March 2011
Open 10.00 - 17.50 daily
The Wildlife Photography of the Year competition attracts amateur and professional wildlife photographers of all ages from around the world. The winner, runner up and commended photograph in each category go on display at the Natural History Museum in London, before embarking on a international tour. The images provide a stunning and thought-provoking insight into the natural world, from underwater scenes to urban wildlife.
Here is the winning image from 2009, taken by Jos̩ Luis Rodriguez, which has now sadly been disqualified after a investigation carried by organisers concluded that the leaping wolf used in Rodriguez's image was an animal model that had been hired for the picture Рa fact strongly denied by the artist...
until 5th March 2011
the flicker club had an outing to the glorious Old Vic in December to watch A Flea in Her Ear and Ooh La La what a fine time was had by all. I had, to be honest, forgotten what a good night out a well executed farce can be. There is nothing quite like the pleasure of seeing characters start to spin with confusion, with you all the time knowing it's all about to implode for them, explode into laughter for you, as they get the comeuppances they deserve. It's as though the play gives you a particular itch, and then scratches it for you..."mmm, nice, yes, down a bit, left a bit, ah ha ha yes, ha ha, more...". Think Curb your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld or Fawlty Towers... know what I mean? A Flea in Her Ear winds up like a clockwork toy, each ridiculous, pompous or paranoid person who comes onstage adding to the tension of the spring at the play's core.
Normal rules don't apply here. If a character has a speech impediment then it's there to be laughed at, but somehow that's ok because this is a deeply democratic world where every single character has a weakness, or an obsession, which is revealed to the audience and becomes delicious food for the comedy. 'It's nothing personal' seems to be the overriding message: we are all flawed, and would all fall flat on our faces as they do, if it all went this wrong for us. And, like those Seinfeld episodes that turn around a simple thing, here the trigger for the "flea in her (Raymonde's) ear" is her husband's recent inability to perform in the bedroom. He must be having an affair, she thinks with fabulous French logic, and sets out to trap him in his lustfulness. And thus it begins...
It's all played with fantastic panache by a sparkling cast led by Tom Hollander who plays, beautifully, not only the central character, insurance boss Chandebise, but also his doppelganger Poche, hotel porter at an upmarket knocking shop of a hotel where we spend act two. How gloriously silly is that? You don't even mind that there's suddenly a lookalike running around, throwing another spanner into an already off kilter universe, because you know it will make for more fun. So you go with it.
John Marquez's jealous Spaniard husband has the audience in stitches every moment he's onstage while Tim McMullen's performance is a lesson in precision. Richard Eyre (director) really understands this form, and keeps the stakes super high for each of these characters, controlling the spiralling pace like the conductor of a Mozart concerto. So here you can have, for example, five characters who really do all happen, for their own individual reasons, to have a reaction to something at exactly the same moment, and to happen to chose identical words in which to express their feelings, and it just tickles the funny bone right and proper, I tell you..
the flicker club girls' night out had a roaring time, drinking Tattinger through the second half, nipping backstage to congratulate our friends in the cast, particularly Tom (who is went well beyond the call of duty to come and read before Scrooge for us for our Christmas event, on his only day off), getting seriously starstruck by Michael Gambon, and ending the night over coffees and cakes in lovely Scooterworks bar on Lower Marsh. All that entertainment on a Tuesday too. How will the rest of the week live up to it, I wonder?
By Caroline Loncq for the flicker club
Ed Robinson's Music Explosion: Private View
Thursday 31st October saw the private view of photographer Ed Robinson's exhibition entitled Music Explosion at Metropolis Recording Studios in Chiswick. A superbly apt venue for Ed's ironic rock photos. We enjoyed canapes and drinks surrounded by images of Robert Plant and Jimmy Paige performing at the Led Zeppelin reunion / Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert at the O2. Ed's contributing a percentage of his fine art sales from the show to show to Ertegun's Education Fund.
Robert Plant / Led Zeppelin O2 concert
Live concert photography as well as posed portraits of artirstes such as Spandau Ballet, Carl Cox and Jamie Cullum grace the walls alongside Sting, U.N.K.L.E, Jeff Beck and an atmospheric portrait of Austrian chanteuse Kim Lone
Kim Lone
Former picture editor Ed Robinson is a photographer as well as art director with OneRedEye. Having been personal photographer for Sir Richard Branson and Harvey Goldsmith CBE, Ed uses his photographic talents for many exciting projects. He is currently working on a series of portraits of the world's top ten female CEOs for a magazine and exhibition.
Jeff Beck
Marna Brown
If you love quality photography and music - get on down there, well worth a look!
Metropolis Group
The Power House
70 Chiswick High Road
W4 1SY
Nearest tube: Stamford Brook (District Line)
Joel Chant for the flicker club
Rubin
All photographs © Ed Robinson
AVA new gallery: Kings Cross
Kings Cross has really changed over the past few years. For the better. It’s been cleaned up, with new eateries, bars and now a 5,000 square foot warehouse which has been transformed into a superb gallery space. All Visual Arts (AVA) have moved their offices and showroom to Omega Place, just off the Caledonian Road. High ceilings and expansive walls make it a great space to see some exciting art works. Recently we went to see their opening show and enjoyed wine and nibbles whilst looking at some large super realist paintings, a strange but fascinating tornado of smoke in a metal cabinet, a chess set made of amber and an op art Christ. The huge white space certainly enhanced the experience and this will be a venue to watch for the future.
Photos courtesy of All Visual Arts
Joel Chant for the flicker club
the flicker club were thrilled to attend the press night of Matthew Bourne's Cinderella at Sadlers Wells this wintery Christmas..
Matthew Bourne’s take on Cinderella first appeared in 1997 – just after his wonderful version of Swan Lake had been a massive critical and commercial success. (Big fans here at the flicker club, that male swan was super sexy).
Cinderella was liked but not loved and apparently even Bourne was not quite satisfied. So the production that has now opened at Sadler’s Wells is substantially reworked. Its masterstroke, now, as then, is to recognise that Prokofiev’s score, with its strong, melancholy undertow, was written during the war - and so to, in a stroke of genius, set the action amidst the ruins of the London Blitz.
You can see the influences of the films of the time, particularly of Powell and Pressburger, as Bourne imagines her guardian angel bringing the café back to life after its destruction by a bomb, the couples rising from the floor like gray ghosts. As they begin to waltz, he captures perfectly the furtive, febrile atmosphere of wartime London, where time is running out, kisses are stolen, drinks snatched and life sucked up in a giddy abandon.
It is the final act twist that makes the production so magical. Because after the party has ended, the wounded pilot pursues his girl through a Hades of prostitutes and spivs until he finds her in hospital.
Their coming together as two ordinary people finding joy in a world of danger, is enormously moving; the closing scene at a railway station, one of touching tenderness, played to perfection by Kerry Biggin as Cinderella and Sam Archer as her Prince. Sadly, no sexy swans though.
Bourne has no more deeply felt work than Cinderella. Dedicated to his father who survived the Blitz but died this year, it is a perfect, warming Christmas treat.
The Star Christmas Drinks
Thank goodness for the wonderful Stephen Williams, Shiv, Kate Gibb and the lovely Al arranging some Christmas drinks.
'twas was the very first evening of snow, it was still the beautiful powdery white stuff, so we donned our wellies and tromped our way to the lovely and warming Star in Tufnell Park.
Upon arrival, there was a designated shoe changing area, where we stashed our (All Saints) wellies and squeezed our feet, rather like a certain young Cinderella, into our dancing shoes for the evenings festivities.
What a turn out. With the fear that only a handful of people would make it, our wonderful friends came out in full force, from all areas of London, to dance the night away. We were thrilled to have lots of flicker regulars there, Mr. James Brown arrived, rather like Santa, with the majority of my Christmas shopping, in his sack.
It all got a bit silly and a bit naughty and much fun and somewhere around 3.00am, Stephen and I caught each others eye and somewhere in our festive Christmas brain's remembered we had our Christmas flicker club event in the morrow with none other than Mr. Tom Hollander coming to join us, so again, rather like Cinderella, regretfully left the merriment before we turned into pumpkins.
thank you so very much to Mr. Conor McDonnell who sent us the following blog all the way from Toronto. How very international. x
First things first; here in Toronto everything’s gone a little bit Burton since the announcement earlier this year of an exhibition spanning the director’s creative career at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Bell Lightbox, swanky new home to all things cinema in Toronto. The exhibit, which exceeded all expectations during its initial run at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and has just finished a successful five month stint in Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image, opened its doors to long queues and rave reviews on November 26th.
Toronto has been deliciously dressed for weeks now with posters, trailers, stripes and teasers, and for those of us who remember guffawing at our first encounter with Beetlejuice or queuing to see Batman, it is a surreal experience to watch the maker of such personal favourites as Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood welcomed and universally acclaimed on such a grand scale. And welcomed he has been; from 7pm on the exhibit’s opening evening all of Burton’s feature films were screened back to back, from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure right through to Alice In Wonderland some 38 hours later; and 13 sturdy souls apparently braved the lot!
Throughout December and January each of his movies will also be screened multiple times and each one will be paired with an older film that Burton has suggested influenced his art production and design. This has led to such choice pairings as Nightmare Before Christmas and Nosferatu; the odd pairing of Beetlejuice and 8 1/2 (!); and the delicious pairing of Vincent Price’s Theatre of Blood (a personal favourite) and Sweeney Todd.
Second things second, myself and Tim have a complicated past. Throughout the mid to late 90s Edward Scissorhands was my favourite film; I have always loved Beetlejuice; Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow are great fun, and, James And The Giant Peach was the first movie that my wife and I saw together. However, Burton’s recent forays into CGI and its endless possibilities have, to my mind, stifled his stylistic signature and allowed an imagination without obvious boundaries the means to sometimes wander off the edge of story and linger a little too long in the sweet shop. That said, I hold high hopes for his upcoming adaptation of that weirdest of gothic soap operas, Dark Shadows (once again starring Johnny Depp).
There is, inevitably, a significant film component to this exhibit. It has been re-designed since its MOMA run to give it a more film-centric feel and moves from decades-old sketches and looped screenings of his early short, Vincent, to glide breathlessly through an exhaustively preserved career. We see Edward Scissorhands’ suit (who knew Johnny Depp had such big feet?) and the cookie maker robot from Vincent Price’s automated assembly line, Catwoman’s suit, latex Batman cowls, skulls, stick thin models and maquettes from The Nightmare Before Christmas, framed paintings of characters from Corpse Bride, the list goes on and on to more than 700 pieces.
You very quickly realize that these are not merely pictures and sculptures that were ‘made for movies’, these pieces are constantly in his head, moving, breathing, laughing and screaming. One of the notable elements of the exhibition is observing the ways in which Burton's ideas develop over time and some concepts recognizable in his most recent films can gradually be traced back through notes, sketches and drawings to decades ago.
The character that first appeared in Vincent morphs through serial sketches into Edward Scissorhands before retreating once more to the comfortable familiarity and conformity of Corpse Bride’s generic groom. In other words, the movies are made because the characters exist, they are an extra expression of what’s already playing in his head, and, as Burton himself repeatedly says, while making the films never gets any easier, all he ever needs to make a drawing is a pencil and napkin.
Magic emerges during those moments when the exhibit veers from the familiarity of Burton’s films. Everywhere you look there are notes, sketches, loose-leaf legal pads, one paragraph script ideas, scribbles, poems, and notepads preserved behind glass, one in particular pinned open to a specific page to display the drawing Romeo & Juliet that presents two monsters the size of counties sweetly holding hands. A sketch of Vincent Price, adorable for the message signed by Price himself, takes you out of the runaway success of Burton’s adult career and puts you in the same room as the child that grew up doodling and dreaming of animating for Disney.
Many of the characters from The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy are represented and some new installations have been fashioned from these stories and sketches especially for the exhibit. Outstanding amongst these are the house that holds Stain Boy, the colours of the interior constantly cycling through organic green to CSI-spatter red (along with a gruesome little surprise in the corner).
Another delight is the full-page presentation of the illustrated story Burton submitted to an editor at Disney in 1976. Burton's submission letter, his manuscript and the resultant rejection letter are all on display, yet even in the rejection there is a tenderness on the part of the editor that takes the time to complement, encourage and advise, careful not to crush the dreams of youth; hard to imagine that today. We see the letter Burton received from the local Fire Department commending his teenage appreciation of fire safety in the designs he had submitted for a Fire Safety Campaign competition. The letter invited Tim and classmates to visit the firehouse (with the appropriate parental permission of course). We also see the Crush Litter cartoon he designed at an early age which was adopted by his native Burbank and for years adorned the township’s garbage trucks.
This exhibit has risen from Burton’s personal vault, studio archives, private collections and even his mother's basement, but recently commissioned items such as Carousel, introduced me to a new dayglow Burton that was exciting on first sight and enthralling on further scrutiny. Coming across like a psychedelic predator on day leave from Yellow Submarine, its crazed grin will stay with me for many a night, but in a good way. Fire safety, garbage trucks, art competitions, dreaming of working at Disney; these are not the daydreams of just any child and thank God this particular child’s dreams came true, even if some of them do turn out to be nightmares.
As for the ‘weirdness’ of it all, it is not so much the weird images or the eerie apposition of horror and childishness that surprise us, we know to expect the unexpected from a man who commands his own Burtonesque adjective, but the weirdness of the level of celebrity foisted on a man who seems oblivious to it all and is truly happiest doodling over a coffee seems simultaneously appropriate and misplaced. While he doesn't necessarily feel comfortable devoting time to an exhibition devoted to himself, he says the experience has been beneficial for him. In his own words,"it's interesting when you don't look at something for so long, to go back and reconnect with it. I think it can kind of re-energize you, it can kind of calibrate your thinking. And it's an interesting thing that I wouldn't have done if it hadn't been for this show." And that has got to be good news for his fans and his films.
Conor McDonnell for the flicker club
