The Beach of Agnes

Last night I was watching a Timeshift documentary called Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction which was very interesting, about the recent popularity of Scandinavian crime and thriller novels after the success of the Steig Larsson books and Henning Mankell's Wallander books.

I was also watching the 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnes, directed by Agnes Varda. The film basically tells the story of Varda's life as she travels to the various places where she lived and uses performance art, art installations, archive footage, still photographs and extracts form her movies to tell her stories, including her time in Hollywood where she shot the first test footage of Harrison Ford (who the studios rejected saying that he had no future in the film industry), her involvement in the sixties counterculture and friendships with Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Morrison among others. It was pretty interesting.

Today I went out to the German Christmas market to meet Mom. We started off at the art gallery and had a coffee and chocolate cupcake. Then we walked around for a bit and had a bratwurst sausage with sauerkraut and mustard and ketchup with a cup of mulled wine, which was nice. I bought an ankh pendent and also a couple of candles, just to make my home smell a bit nicer.

Mr. Nice

It was another really dull day at work, and not a particularly good one. It was one of those days where I just couldn't wait to get away.

When I left work I went up to the Cineworld cinema to see my next Film Festival movie which was Mr. Nice, directed by Bernard Rose and based on the autobiographical book by Howard Marks. The film opens with Marks (played by Rhys Ifans) taking his first experiemnts with drugs in the early 1960s at Oxford University and follows his eventful life as he becomes a notorious marijuana smuggler and sometime spy. The movie was often very funny and packed with incident, although due to the nature of it being a biographical film, there wasn't really a proper storyline just a succession of incidents. It was very stylishly made and unusually, instead of using captions to denote the passage of time from the early 1960s until the mid 1990s, the look of the movie changes to mirror the look of movies that were being made at the time the action is set. I've never read the book, although I have heard that it's very good. I'll have to check it out now I've seen the film.

At the screening were the actors Rhys Ifans and David Thewlis along with the director, Bernard Rose (who directed Candyman among many others), and also Howard Marks himself, who has become a real cult figure following the huge success of the book and often goes on speaking tours and which made for the unusual experience of watching a film biography of someone and knowing that the film's subject is there in person. The four did an entertaining question and answer session with the audience afterwards. Thewlis mentioned that he was genuinely worried that the person he played, a violent killer, was still on the loose and was unlikely to be particularly thrilled with the movie. Apparently Thewlis had been warned that he "might receive death threats... but not to take them seriously".

Touching from a Distance

Last night I finished reading Touching from a Distance by Deborah Curtis. The book is a biography of Ian Curtis, the lead singer and lyricist of the band Joy Division (Deborah Curtis was married to Ian from when they were both teenagers until his suicide in May 1980 at the age of 23, two days before the band were scheduled to depart on their first US tour). It's a fascinating, but very bleak book, and Ian Curtis does not come across very well at all in the book. The book is very short, but it does include a complete list of Joy Dvision gigs and discography. It also includes all the lyrics that Curtis wrote and fragments of notebook entries. The book was used as the main source for the 2007 film Control.

It was another very quiet day at work today, but at least the weather had brightened up a little.