Mirror

Last night I was watching a Russian film from 1975 called Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is a virtually plotless portrait of three generations of a Russian family. It is loosely autobiographical and merges past and present, childhood memories, semi-documentary elements, contemporary scenes and dreamlike fantasy. As with most Tarkovsky films this features astonishingly beautiful images, shot in long languid takes. The film was very much a family affair featuring Tarkovsky's wife and his mother as actors, as well as his father Arseny Tarkovsky, an acclaimed poet, who reads his own poetry on the soundtrack. If you let yourself go with the film it provides an astonishingly beautiful and genuinely haunting viewing experience.

Today I went out and renewed my Ridacard bus pass for another month. I also bought a gift voucher for my brother's birthday at the end of this month, and a card. My brother lives in London so we usually just give each other gift vouchers as gift, because we never know what else to get. On my way home I stopped off and got my groceries for the week. Among my groceries I got today's copy of The Guardian newspaper, which was giving away a free DVD of the original Godzilla.

This afternoon I was watching Godzilla, a 1954 Japanese film directed by Ishiro Honda. The film opens with the mysterious disappearances of several ships in the same area of the ocean. The disappearances are initially blamed on mines or undersea volcanos. However, when a research team visit a nearby island they soon discover the real source of the disappearances: A giant prehistoric monster, with a fiery breath, which the islanders named Godzilla, and which lives undersea but has been awakened by recent H-bomb tests and is now on the rampage. It's not long before he's headed for Tokyo, determined to stomp the city and eat the trains. The film was hugely successful in it's day, spawning endless sequels, cartoon shows and a big-budget Hollywood re-make. The film has a strong anti-nuclear message and is much darker than a lot of the later films, with a lot of emphasis on the death and devastation that the creature causes. The Japanese name for the film and the monster is "Gojira" (a combination of the words "gorilla" and "kujira" the Japanese word for "whale"), because the original conception for the creature was apparently to be a cross between a gorilla and a whale.

I was also watching a very good episode of Doctor Who this evening.