Hat Hat Bang Bang

 

In which I belatedly honour THE film of 2023...

 

 (A placeholder's good for more than one day, right?)

 The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway, cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into it than the idea deserved.

 

 

 

Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida

 

 And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.

 

And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)

Odysseys in Increasing Order of Snappiness

 "Tell me about a complicated man..." Okay then.

  The Jermyn Street Theatre and London Review of Books' online reading of Emily Wilson's superb translation of The Odyssey is tomorrow. (Today? Friday anyway.) Kicking off at nine in the morning, seventy-one actors - including me at around four in the afternoon - will have the impossible job of following Janet Suzman, but if twelve hours is too long an Odyssey for you don't worry, I've looked out some shorter ones. You can watch Hallmark's three-hour mini-series starring Armand "Rico Dredd" Assante, for example, HERE.

 Michael J. Pollard plays a Wind God, and ten minutes in Heathcote Williams is attacked by a giant eel so it's an odd watch, I won't lie, while Armand Assante... I mean I love him, but he's about as complicated as a tap. You haven't come to a film of The Odyssey for the complications though, so if you can't spare three hours why not instead check out THIS? Recommended by David Cairns (again), the almost completely unknown 1954 Italian adaptation stars Kirk Douglas and comes in at just under a hundred minutes.

  Still too long? That's alright, I haven't seen it yet either. Don't go anywhere. Last one: Shot on the original camera of the Brothers Lumières to celebrate a hundred years of cinema, Greek auteur Theodoros Angelopoulos' 1995 adaptation of Homer's Odyssey runs to just fifty-seven seconds...