This is kind of a brave book. The direct desperation and lack of composure of the narrator combined with the omnipresent situating of events in specific locations in London reminds me of a very particular time in my life. In the way that good writing does it reminds me of the good and also the bad and shameful that I’ve pushed down as the mistakes of a younger, stupider person. I have never made the kinds of grandiosely bad decisions that are going on in this story, nor was I ever quite sobeholden to the parasocial spectator culture but I remember all of it. I remember the acid feelings it gives you in your stomach. I wouldn’t have remembered it without this book. It’s feral. It’s a great excavation of the sexual desperation, the directionlessness, the feeling of London.
We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we’ve been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we’ve been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn’d walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill to Neues Off. It’s always packed in the tiny little atrium there with small groups of friends chatting on the pavement outside, even in the freezing cold. Once we pushed our way through to have our tickets checked, it transpired I’d brought us to the wrong cinema and that we should be at Passage Kino on Karl-Marx-Allee. It is not the first time I’ve made this kind of mistake. We took the U-Bahn down there and still sat down before the movie started, comfortably.
I watched this with the in-laws at Christmas as part of a Richard Curtis runthrough. Coming after Notting Hill it was stark how poorly this film has aged in comparison. Perhaps it was never as good in the first place, but Hugh Grant is far more clearly a twat, Kristen Scott Thomas’s character is written as a complete moron, and neither of these in the endearing ways that the writer cracks later. Nevertheless, the Auden bit still gets you, but he didn’t write that did he.
Although LyseDoucet’s [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She’s a badass, and this feels like a relatively well executed diversion for her. The debt this owes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or maybe that that movie owes to hotels like this, is clear.
I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It’s an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there’s a bit of self-aggrandising in here and there’s not a little bit of misogyny. Maybe that’s authentically what a slightly mercenary TV producer in Russia sounds like, though.
I like a movie that gets out of hand like this. I’d forgotten until the opening credits that this was Ari Aster. Its marketing doesn’t have the trappings of the horror genre because the setting doesn’t have those traditional elements either. But this is definitely horrific, and effective. Its ideas are right on its sleeve but it still has interesting enough things to say about them that it works. There’s a streak in me, and I see it in others, to find the major questions of our time just aesthetically lame and to not want them to appear in my art for that reason. Coronavirus,screens and online radicalisation, fascism, division, all that crap is what I’m talking about. Nobody wanted to see a Covid movie for a long time and the first scene of this movie hits that point hard with a conversation about literal face mask policing.
Watched as part of a triple-kino weekend in dark, freezing Berlin. This one at Rollberg. Maybe that contributed to our dislike; we always resent walking past Passage and having to climb the hill to the ugly shopping centre.
We both hated the ending. It was visually poorly executed and seemed like a reshoot, sound stagey, VFXey mess. It was also not really earned. Why is she tearing pages out of her notebook? She was never writing! Was it real or a fantasy or a delusion? Who cares.
This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we’re meant to find her ridiculous.
We both suspected that she really was an alien at different points during the movie.
When Teddy exploded in the wardrobe, I wondered for a moment whether either he’d detonated the vest on purpose in an attempt to kill the aliens on whatever ship he thought he was being teleported to, or she’d somehow triggered the vest to trick him. The latter theory was ruled out by the fact she probably wouldn’t have done that in her actual teleportation wardrobe.
This really reminds me of being a certain age and experiencing the culture as remixed in Tumblr posts and usernames. It’s kind of a series of poses in tableaux. It was made to be clipped, GIFed and posted to Tumblr with “ugh, this.” as the caption. Which is to say, I like this short film and it reminds me of a much simpler time that I thought was complicated when I was living it.