Deserves a much lower rating. Humorous melodrama without actually being funny sustains itself well for 600 pages of breezy fluff but at 126 minutes much of the characterisation is done in broadstrokes that feels weak especially for the first half which is mostly setting up the inevitable. This also extends to the characters themselves as while characters who look mo more than 4ft tall work well in a constrained comic panel the wide landscapes skews perspecive and not always to…

HALLOWEEN! (Or where I decide to watch every Pere Portabella film in October) Day 7

If Cuadecuc succeeds by finding a through-line between fiction and reality through Franco's absurdity then Umbracle complicates both by parodying the parody. In this sense Portabella's film is the cinematic equivalent of a series of footnotes to his main text, interesting in their own right but very hard to comprehend as a stand alone work.

Formally no other movies of his better captures what it…

I spent my whole life wanting to be a mathematician. I excelled in it at primary school, continued it into secondary school where my capabilities made up for deficiencies in the social sciences and the like. This continued into college where I did my A Levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry, letting the STEM grandeur take over and shedding all other pursuits as inquisitive hobbies. This narcissism only continued when my master’s application was accepted, narrowing my focus…

I’d never seen a horizon in my life. A long stretch passed from the heavenly days of 1978 to twenty years later where a fine scarlet chasm gulfed between the terran and the avian on a crisp Christmas morning. Malick was in his element. Gosling took centre, his furrowed fibonacci brow vanishing at the centre of his twenty-eight whites. Mara followed next, a perpendicular angle connects her forearm to her guitar, her fingers strumming to Klaus Wiese’s vision to a…