My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Today it was another average and fairly long day at work. I left shortly after five and I was pretty much the only one left in the office.

After work I went along to the Filmhouse cinema to meet up with my Mum and to see My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, directed by Werner Herzog, at the Film Festival. The film was produced by David Lynch, and set mostly in San Diego, where a young man, Brad (played by Michael Shannon), has just murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with a samurai sword at a neighbour's house. After the murder, he holes himself up in his house with a shotgun and two hostages. A homicide detective (Willem Dafoe) attempts to unravel the man's motives for his crime with the aid of Brad's fiancee (Chloe Sevigny) and friend (Udo Kier). Their stories, shown in fashback detail Brad's increasingly bizarre existance since his lfe was changed during a traumatic visit to Peru a year earlier. Apparently based on a true story, the movie has many touches of both Herzog and Lynch. It has plenty of strange humour, such as Brad describing his pet flamingoes as "eagles in drag" and strong performances and a memorable soundtrack. Occasionally it meanders a bit but the movie retains a strange power. According to Herzog the intent of the film was to make a horror movie without any explicit blood and gore but with a "strong mounting sense of dread". One interesting thing about the movie, which may have been due to Lynch's influence, is the amount of coffee that the characters drink, and they make a big deal of it. The main charcter even has his "special coffee cup".

After the movie we went along to Pizza Express to meet my Dad. I had doughballs and garlic butter to start, and then a Four Seasons pizza, basically it's a pizza devided into quarters witha different topping on each quarter: cheese, mushrooms, pepperoni and anchovies with olives. It was really nice.

Back home I finished reading the book "Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer!" Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics by Vern. Vern, no second name given, writes movie reviews for the Ain't It Cool News website, and the book, as the title suggests, is a collection of reviews and essays on films. They mostly concentrate on action movies but there is a wide range of movies covered. The reviews are mostly well-written, witty and intelligent, although one thing that I did notice is that there was a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, presumably partly due to the fact that they were taken from websites.