Rad Sad Grads

Grolsch Film Works website has just launched and I’ve written a piece on cinema’s top five sad grads. Read here and you should have a good old browse of the website too! For inspirational joy, and proving that quarter-life crises can also be pretty (crap), I include a couple of my fave pics below.

Patience (After Sebald) review

My review of Grant Gee’s ‘Patience (After Sebald)’ (2011) for Permanent Plastic Helmet.

This is my main man – writer and academic W. G. Sebald.

Moonshine

A series of morbid and/ or dead things inspired by too much time in the library or thinking about being in the library. The first woman looks how I feel!
(Sources: Fleurs Mortes blog, Caught film still)

Nothing Lasts Forever

Never again.

I’m off the sauce. Let’s see how long this lasts. Pray for me.

Amazing

Katy Perry’s cover of her new album Teenage Dream. She’s so Barbarella!

Fabulous 60′s posters part II

Fabulous 60′s film posters

The Lover theatre review

My review of Harold Pinter’s The Lover for the Oxford Theatre Review can be read here:

Barbarella: Plastic Fantastic

1968 is well known for its revolutionary fever, but less so for its plastic cinematic futurism. Both Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) present their vision of the future as a particularly plastic one, reminding us of the famous quotation in The Graduate just the year before: the future is “Plastics”. In Barbarella, plastic is one of the many pliable materials that make up the futuristic 60’s decor, leading the British design critic Reyner Banham (1973) to describe the film set as “a triumph of software” with “an ambience of curved, pliable, continuous, breathing, adaptable surfaces”.

The film sets are as impressive as they are kitsch and are characterised by their tactility and sensuality of shape. Orange shagpile carpets, velvet walls, plastic cocoons, and phallic-shaped weaponry abound. Make no mistake – plastics notwithstanding, Barbarella is about sex and little else. The heroine is a liberated space goddess of the 41st century, who was once described by Roger Vadim as “a kind of sexual Alice in Wonderland of the future”. Like Alice, Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda, Vadim’ s then wife), is on a quest which involves climbing in and out of strange, often Freudian-inspired crevices, visiting new lands and meeting and mating with strange people along the way. Again, like Alice, materials seem to attach themselves to, or fall off the heroine at will. From the first scene, plastic, in particular, is shown to adorn and adhere to Barbarella’s fetishized body. The heroine cavorts around her shagpile spaceship in a skin-tight black outfit better suited to the world of fetish than practical space travel.

The Spanish fashion designer Paco Rabanne created most of the outfits in the film using rhodoid (an unusual plastic made from purified cellulose), which was both silky and pliable. Jeffrey L. Meikle in his book American Plastic: A Cultural History (1997) describes the opening scene where Barbarella performs a zero-gravity striptease as a “plasticized parody of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus”. He notes how both her cascading blonde hair, and the aqueous substance she seems to be floating in, are reminiscent of the famous painting, something which is only emphasized by the lyrics: “Barbarel-la, psychedel-la, there’s a kind-a cockleshell a-bout you”. Much of this cultural forecasting now looks wonderfully out-of-date. Cultural evolution has accelerated so quickly that a 60’s vision of the 41st century looks remarkably like 1968.