Saturday, 11th March, 2006

Two Rings

film review

Went to see A Cock And Bull Story last night with a couple of friends — well, one friend and one new acquaintance. New Acquaintance had just discovered that he was allergic to yeast, so we helped him mark the occasion of his Last Pint™ for a long time.

Seriously, seriously recommend that film At several moments throughout, me (and the rest of the audience) were clutching our guts we were laughing so much. At several other moments too, we were clutching our mouths in disbelief at what we were seeing.

I'd like to sum up the film — explain what it's about and stuff — but I can't. I left the cinema feeling confused, bewildered, and unsure exactly what it was that I'd just experienced — but loving it.

All the clips that I've seen on the telly concentrated on the scenes between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon — in particular, Brydon's impressions of Alan Partridge (which he's very good at) — but there was so much more to the film than that.

It jumps all over the place. One minute Steve Coogan is doing a piece to camera, acting the part of the father of Tristram Shandy (whose part he's playing in the film that they're trying to make), the next he's sitting in a bar talking to a journalist, tring to diffuse the (real life?) controversy about his antics in a lap-dancing club.

And the next moment, he's hanging upside-down, naked in a foam womb being laughed at by Gillian Anderson.

It was this jumping around from 'film within a film' to supposed real-life that made it work for me — despite leaving me bewildered. Towards the end, I felt it fragmented itself just a little too much, but it made up for it in the improvised (?) post-film discussion between Brydon and Cogan as the credits rolled.

I guess it's like when you're watching a film normally, you know exactly where you are — how you're supposed to interact with it. You're the audience, and behind the Fourth Wall of the screen, there are things happening that you can watch.

But in this film, you're taken out of that space, and presented with a fifth, sixth and seventh wall. At one point, for example, as Brydon is explaining to Gillian Anderson where he was injured in a battle through the use of a ludicrously accurate scale model, we see the film crew in the background and feel party to them.

But then you remember that there must be another film crew, filming them.

Look, I can't do it justice at all Go see it. The scene with the sash window is particularly good — you'll either laugh yourself sensless, or you'll be traumatised for weeks.

Ooh, and it's got Dylan Moran in it — and he's, like, my hero

Thats Ardal O'Hanlon your thinking of there

Oh very good

You can borrow my copy of Life and Times of Tristram Shandy

One of the best lines in the film, I thought, was when Anthony Wilson is interviewing Steve Coogan about the book...

SC: "It was 8th in the Observer's Books Of All Time list"

AW: "Yes, but they were in chronological order"

Comfort of Vision

tranny self selfperception selfdelusion

(That's a crap title. I might change it I just hate it when I've got a thought in my head and can't quite express it. No matter) ... All day, I've been staring at something. It is (to be honest) a bit of a design conundrum, but I'm hoping that within about five paragraphs, I can turn it around and make it into something relevant to transvestism.

Because I've writted sod all about that for ages.

I've got a little project on the go at the moment — something I've been tinkering with for a long time. Underneath all the aesthetics, there's a very well-defined conceptual basis to the whole thing — I just can't seem to be able to make the visual side of it work.

The more I stare at it, the more it seems to be working — but when I trot off elsewhere on the net, for inspiration, I keep coming back to mine and suddenly gasping at the hideousness of it.

And that's a little bit like being a trannie...

( — only took four paragraphs ... neat)

...see, I spend a lot of time looking at myself in the mirror. I've mentioned before that I've got one next to my Mac, for example. Now, you may be thinking "What a vain little cow", and I wouldn't argue with you, but what's struck me isn't the amount of times I glance across at it, it's the context in which I reframe what I see in my head each time.

That was clumsy — I'll rephrase

I think I've got so used to trying to convince myself that I look like a girl, that my brain has finally given in and decided not to argue with me. To the point that earlier — during a small "I'm going to put on a frock" session (which I'll come back to) — I was looking at myself, utterly convinced I looked like a woman ... with a four-day beard.

Maybe, after enough conditioning, our brains choose to switch off certain things — ignoring them in favour of sucking up to the fantasy going on in our heads.

Maybe.

It's a little like (I suppose) whatever it was I was talking about last night that prompted me to think "yeah, that's a little like when you get so used to your own smell, you don't smell it any more".

...

I think though, extending this, that there is a community-based mis-perception-thing going on as well.

You know sometimes, when people (including myself) put pictures up online that don't really do us any favours? Bad light, crappy makeup, blatantly not looking remotely convincing ... and they get loads of comments along the lines of "You look great!"?

I wonder sometimes if that happens out of politeness, or maybe it's just supposed to be encouragement.

But I also wonder sometimes if we've all spent so long looking at (a) ourselves, and (b) pictures of other tranies, that we've all gone aesthetically blind?

...

Just one last tiny thing on a vaguely similar subject. Sometimes, when I've taken a lot of pictures of myself and I'm going through them to pick out the best, there's one or two that I think "Wow, that's great" and shove them online straight away.

It's invariably those pictures that I come back to, a few months later, and think "Dear God Curran, what were you thinking?!"

Purely as a case in point...

...see?

I'm not sure what it is that's going on in my head when I decide that these are Good Pictures™. Honestly I don't. Maybe it's like blinkers — or perhaps some kind of 'red mist' brought on by the whole (slightly giddy) experience of getting dressed up.

Or maybe, it's spending so bloody long taking several dozen shots, I kinda feel I have to use at least some of them

Did you crop that one I was talking about the other day BTW?

Wines I Have Loved

photo

This is very posh