This week I had much more free time than usual, thanks to the November 1-2 holidays, and the Ciaran storm that kept everyone safely at home.
- 🏛️ This is no longer Halloween, but the highlight of the week was visiting Tim Burton’s Labyrinth , an exhibition dedicated to creations by the director of Beetlejuice. Despite lacking actual artifacts from the films, the atmosphere while going room by room in the labyrinth was quite immersive. Highly recommended, although I regret not finding the right door to come face to face with The Penguin.
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🎮 Since everybody’s talking about Super Mario Wonder, I dusted off my Nintendo Switch trying to make progress in Super Mario Bros U Deluxe, which I periodically (annually?) pick up, somehow forgetting that I no longer have the skills - or the patience - for platform games. With some satisfaction and a considerable expenditure of time, I managed to go from the Meringue Clouds world to Peach’s Castle, which I imagine is the last one in the game; another couple of years, and I should make it!
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📖 Bought perhaps a decade ago, I finally started reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos: a book about the concept of translation and (I suppose) the difficulties of translations from one language to another. It’s a subject that fascinates me, although after a couple of chapters, I feel that the writing style abounds in examples and repetitions that extend each concept for pages and pages;
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🎵 I dedicated a separate post to my impressions as a former Beatlemaniac on Now and Then;
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📺 The most interesting viewing of the week was the fifth episode of Loki (the best episode of season 2), which reminded me that - aside from Synchronic - I had not yet delved into the much-acclaimed cosmic horror of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead;
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🎬 So, in the span of a couple of days, I caught up with Resolution and The Endless: the first film - which reminded me of the first Saw for the economy of its staging - left me open-mouthed for a good part of its development, unable to anticipate what would happen; at the end of Resolution, I couldn’t help but immediately start watching The Endless, which, more conventional and explicit, still managed to surprise me (with a decidedly ‘wtf?!’ moment) and provide a convenient (and partly irrelevant) interpretation for the first film. Both directly on the list of favorite films ever, with Resolution almost reaching five stars;
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🎬 A quiet afternoon also convinced me to watch Lawrence of Arabia (whenever else would I have the energy to watch a nearly four-hour movie?). Universally praised as a masterpiece, it didn’t engage me as much as other films by David Lean like Brief Encounter or The Bridge on the River Kwai: the problem is that I didn’t really understand the character Lawrence, constantly oscillating between megalomaniacal histrionics (Peter O’Toole’s expressions reminded me more than once of Johnny Depp’s) and the sense of colonial guilt, without ever highlighting an intermediate transition between the two moods. Next stop, Doctor Zhivago?
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🎬 From the sacred Lean to the profane, this week I succumbed to the insistence of Netflix, which proposed the Spanish horror Veronica by Paco Plaza, which only later I identified as the co-author of Rec; it’s not as relentless as the found footage film, but it manages to stage a couple of very effective sequences;
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🎬 From Veronica to its recently released spin-off that Netflix has just released - Sister Death, also by Plaza - the step was short: more of an atmospheric horror than a truly spooky one, it stands out for its rather original denouement;
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🎬 The same cannot be said for another film on the same theme, the The Nun ‘original’ by Corin Hardy, which I found less terrible than most reviews and Letterboxd implied. By now, under the features of the ’evil nun,’ we recognize the face of Bonnie Aarons, and it doesn’t have the same effect anymore; moreover, nothing makes the film surreal like Michael Smiley in clerical attire.