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This holiday, I finally finished “The City & The City” by China Miéville.

My paper version of the Miéville book was a gift. Its hugeness makes it hard to carry, so I never got round to reading it. I bought it again for my Kindle (I wonder how often that happens?). Alongside his newly coined words there are many that lie just outside my vocabulary, so the built-in Kindle dictionary was very handy. Some of his invented words, e.g. “grosstopically” and “toppelganger”, make so much sense. I almost wish I lived in his cleaved world of seeing and unseeing, just so I could use them.

I’m reading another book of his, Embassytown, right now. It is more outright Science Fiction, and is spattered with new words. A main subject of the book is language, so this richness makes sense in this context, but I imagine I would grow sick of it if the usage wasn’t so relevant.

I seem to be into a ‘divided city’ shtick this holiday, as I also read Jerusalem by Guy Delisle. A lot of it is just day-to-day errands and looking after his kids; not surprising, given it’s basically a diary. However, it is leavened by the many WTF moments when he encounters another bizarre behaviour of the locals. The strange but rigid rules of movement in The City & The City seem pedestrian in comparison to the complex enforcements in place in Israel and Palestine.

Delisle isn’t primarily there for journalistic purposes; he mostly just happens to be there with his wife, who works for MSF. This make Delisle a lot softer than other authors, like Sacco. I find it hard to read more than one of Sacco’s books in quick succession. They are lively, in-depth, but simply too depressing.

However, I haven’t read one of Sacco’s in a while, so it may be time to spend more holiday money on Amazon … recommendations?

On Friday, I had the opportunity to see La Grand Illusion at the Filmhouse,

I can totally see why this film was so hated by the Nazis, because it portrays war as ultimately pointless. There is no great ‘enemy’ within these prison camps, on either side. There are only world-weary men waiting, and hoping, for the end to come.

My only criticism is that the characters seem almost too humane; but perhaps this is my cynicism speaking. Regardless, it’s a wonderful film that well lives up to expectation.

If you like this film, then you may be interested in others from ‘Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists’; don’t worry too much about the timetable, I’m already three months behind.

All change on Saturday for “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!”. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an Aardman film, but thanks to cheap tickets via Hugh (thanks Hugh!) and a resounding answer of “YES” when I asked Nils, we went along.

I’m beginning to think I’m very conservative when it comes to violence in kids films. Pirates isn’t a particularly scary film, compared to some others, but it still has plenty of knives, killing (off-screen) and impending doom. Nils survived, and there were no nightmares, but he was keen to point out that he had to hide next to me three times during the film (perhaps this number should be a new indicator of scaryness?).

I think I lolled three times and at one point Nils made a noise I’ve never heard before which was 20% anguish and 80% joy, so overall, a hit.

I’m going to see Aliens on Tuesday, so this month is turning into a proper film-fest after months of nothing. Don’t worry, I won’t be taking Nils along to that one ;-)

Finally, the weekend was rounded off on Sunday by searching for Easter eggs in the garden. The chocolate was very nice, but the “Easter Bread” made by Carmen was even better (it’s like Mr Kiplings Exceedlingly Good cakes, but with the marsipan top spread liberally throughout the bread). Carmen claims she made it a bit too sweet, by accident. I can live with these mistakes.

Got in the holiday mood last night by watching the film of The Road. This is right up there with “Grave of the Fireflies” on the brilliant-but-sad scale (see 2008-03-22).

Despite overly expensive films and the usual EIFF website broken-ness, I managed to see a few films this year.

There were five shorts in Mapping the Extraordinary. All were good, but these three make me we want to see more from the directors:

Pentecost by Peter McDonald

I suspect this will mean more to you if you had any sort of Catholic upbringing. The end is a righteous, well deserved, FU to the local church establishment. The football analogy was a little overplayed at times, but it didn’t spoil it.

Animal Control by Kire Papput

Link:

The trailer doesn’t do this justice. The very spare use of dialogue and the repetition of the same shots, with subtle but significant changes, build up nicely to illustrate the change in the inner life of the main character.

Six Strands by Chaitanya Tamhane

Six Strands Trailer from Chaitanya Tamhane on Vimeo.

Though just a short, the story is well-developed and deep. It leaves you satisfied and wanting to return and watch it again.

The only main feature I saw was Almanya, Welcome to Germany:

This had me laughing for half of it and with a lump in my throat the rest of the time. If you’ve ever stayed in Germany for any length of time then I’m sure you’ll recognise some of their reactions (particularly to the food). Not only is this a great story with emotional depth, it’s also cleverly told. I’m definitely buying this on DVD.

Grave of the Fireflies is not a film I’d recommend be seen by anyone with children.

After we had Nils, I imagined myself being affected by all the schmaltzy Speilberg movies featuring children in trouble. Thankfully, that never happened. However, this one caught me by surprise. It was one of the few movies in a Studio Giblhi collection that we didn’t recognise. We put in on, naively expecting another piece of Totoro-style magic. I was instead left devastated.

“Star rating: 5, Would you recommend this to anyone: never”