Molière, Buñuel's Milky Way, Lidl Orange Juice up in price, and 60s photos at the National Portrait Gallery

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK

Film Review : Molière
Much to my surprise over Christmas I discovered that you can now watch films again on BBC iPlayer. I guess when the beeb buys films now they are getting clearance for the UK internet broadcast. One which I watched this way was a dramatisation of the life of French playwright Molière. According to wikipedia the story only vaguely reflected his actual life, but nevertheless it was an entertaining package.

Romain Duris, the guy who plays Molière, a.k.a. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, was great at conveying contempt (for his vain patron Monsieur Jourdain, played by Fabrice Luchini, who hires him to teach him to act) and passion (for his patron’s long-suffering wife).

The conceit of the film is that eventually Molière’s most outrageous comedy is a faithful representation of this episode of his life. Whilst in his way rather bumbling, and almost Chaplin-esque with his moustache, Molière cleverly thwarts the worst ambitions of a fraudulent nobleman who is swindling Jourdain, and intertwines romance, comedy and tragedy in his anonymous love for Madame Jourdain, whilst ineptly pretending to be a priest staying with them to instruct their daughter.
Overall Review: Thumbs firmly up. A clever funny film.

Film Review: The Milky Way (La voie lactée) (Luis Buñuel)
After the last 2 Buñuel films I thought I was braced for anything, but I clearly wasn’t. Again I was indebted to the accompanying documentary on the DVD for making sense of it for me. The film follows 2 ‘pilgrims’ on their journey through France and Spain. Why they are doing it and why people behave so strangely towards them are mind-crunchingly bound up in religious dogma debates of the last 2 millennia.

Complicated dialogue accompanies sword fighting and priests sitting in bars with rude policemen. The lesson we learn is that if key religious dogmas (that were fought for in life-and-death struggles at the time) are put into a vaguely contemporary setting, they appear surreal and mind-blowing. I don’t think my religious knowledge is good enough to make sense of it all, but possibly the ‘ride’ would have been less painful if I hadn’t had any knowledge and wasn’t trying to understand it.
Overall Review: Thumbs up, but intellectually challenging and left me ready for a lie-down.

Retail News: Lidl’s own not-from-concentrate orange juice up in price
No sooner had I said how great Lidl’s orange juice was at 79p a carton than the price suddenly leapt to £1.09. I was still reeling at how I’d been drawn in to try it, when last week it leapt again to £1.29! Of course it’s still cheaper than its Tropicana equivalent, but I was staggered at how they used an initially super low price to get me to try it and then let the price creep up to that of its competitor.

Exhibition Review: Beatles to Bowie:the 60s Exposed, National Portrait Gallery
I’d not heard about this exhibition at all, until my fellow Herb Rosehip invited me to come and see it with him just before it finished. It was badly named in that it began before the Beatles and ended as Bowie is only just beginning. The 60s Exposed was the more accurate part of the name as the exhibition chronicled photography through the sixties, although this again did not sum up the band/pop star focus of the photos on show.

In fact I would have wanted to see it more if I’d been given an accurate idea of what was inside. The show featured strips of wall text describing each year in the sixties, and then large prints of photographs, occasionally interspersed with cases containing the magazines, record sleeves and sheet music that the photographs went on to appear in.

I was immediately taken by a front cover of Mirabelle magazine featuring a close up photo of my hero Jet Harris, original bass player with the Shadows. The big prints enabled you to see tantalising details in the photos, such as the classic old style letters ‘J’ and ‘H’ stuck onto Jet Harris’ Fender Precision bass guitar. These are the sort of letters that nowadays you only see in hardware shops for labelling doors in a warehouse, but then they looked super cool.

Another print showed Joe Meek in his studio with the Tornadoes. The detail on Heinz’s pubescent skin was striking. In fact in many of the pictures what struck you was the unglamorous nature of many of the pop stars of the time. I was around in the sixties, and didn’t feel it then, but now I felt that some of the men in bands had trouble conveying a smile and looked like they would have been more at home in a labouring job, or being the villain in a kitchen-sink drama.

Some contact prints (strip of photos as actually taken) showed that photo shoots were not long in those days. In shoots I’ve done a good few reels can be used on trying different lighting etc. for very similar photos. The iconic shot of the Beatles all leaping in the air was one of only two leaps in a set of contact prints.

As the exhibition moved on it got more glamorous and there was some fun in finding out the locations where some iconic images were captured. The Rolling Stones were on Primrose Hill for the front cover of ‘Between The Buttons’, the same place where my father’s ashes are now scattered. In one section photos taken for French magazine ‘Salut les copains’ were on display. Two featured bizarre combinations of Françoise Hardy and Mick Jagger and Brian Jones respectively. We learned that the multi-prism lens used to take the picture for the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Pink Floyd’s first album, was state of the art at the time. Psychedelic prints of The Beatles could be bought for a mere £950 a set! One very striking picture was of Jane Birkin, naked from the waist up with her long hair blowing out in all directions.

Glad I saw all this before it disappeared.

parsley.L at virgin.net [http://freespace.virgin.net/alpha.moonbase/garden.records]