Films you've seen lately

[Conchis]

How does one train to become a lesbian?
Are you, Conchis, a trainer? (Inadvertently, it may be....)....

My comment may have sounded frivolous, but it wasn't. :)

Said friend is basically heterosexual but has decided that she doesn't like men and doesn't want to be in a relationship with one. She has always felt more comfortable among her own sex but is not naturally 'oriented' towards them. She's attempting to change.

I know other women who have felt the same way and have done the same thing. No idea if there are any male equivalents, but I presume there must be.

[jayne lee wilson]

My comment may have sounded frivolous, but it wasn't. :)

Said friend is basically heterosexual but has decided that she doesn't like men and doesn't want to be in a relationship with one. She has always felt more comfortable among her own sex but is not naturally 'oriented' towards them. She's attempting to change.

I know other women who have felt the same way and have done the same thing. No idea if there are any male equivalents, but I presume there must be.

These scenarios always sound like studies in human self-unawareness, and make me really doubt the existence of free will, problematic concept as it already is.....

[Conchis]

These scenarios always sound like studies in human self-unawareness, and make me really doubt the existence of free will, problematic concept as it already is.....

Although I know better than to say anything to her, I have my doubts. I think she likes the idea of being a lesbian the way someone may 'like the idea' of being a poet or a stockbroker - but just because you 'like the idea' doesn't mean you can fulfil the position.

That said, I once knew a lesbian couple - both in their sixties - one of whom had been 'straight' for most of her life and had entered into the relationship for the reasons I describe above. The other had never been in a heterosexual relationship and had never been interested in men. They seemed happy enough but I think their relationship was based more on companionship than anything else (and what's wrong with that?).

There is a school of thought in feminism that you cannot be a feminist without being a lesbian. I've known other women who attempted same-sex relationships only to conclude, as one of them described it, that they were 'hopelessly heterosexual'. So, you may be right about the exercise in self-unawareness but 'you never really know until you try....'

As the late George Brown once commented to Barbara Castle (apropos the 1964-70 Labour government's proposed abolition of anti-homosexual laws): 'Isn't sex bloody awful?'

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, sex can be bloody great at the right time and place too.... but as desire cools with time you may feel a certain liberation.

I can never quite shake the feeling though that - if we were all honest with ourselves - very few of us, whether bisexual, bicurious, gender fluid or many other human varieties - most of us do really know which sex we are most attracted to....(aren't sexual experiments based, in the end, on boredom?)

I've never been completely convinced that it can change, not fundamentally, however the circumstances, or opportunities, desperate or wilful, may sometimes make it appear.....
Feel free, anyone, to contradict that, anecdotally or otherwise....!

[Conchis]

Well, sex can be bloody great at the right time and place too.... but as desire cools with time you may feel a certain liberation.

I can never quite shake the feeling though that - if we were all honest with ourselves - very few of us, whether bisexual, bicurious, gender fluid or many other human varieties - most of us do really know which sex we are most attracted to....(aren't sexual experiments based, in the end, on boredom?)

I've never been completely convinced that it can change, not fundamentally, however the circumstances, or opportunities, desperate or wilful, may sometimes make it appear.....
Feel free, anyone, to contradict that, anecdotally or otherwise....!

Totally agree with you there.

[Dave2002]

I guess it was Sophocles who was glad to be old enough not to have to enjoy sex.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/15/chained/

[Edgy 2]

Another gem from Talking Pictures

Malta Story

Alec Guiness,Jack Hawkins et al and a marvelous score by William Alwyn.
Not sure when it was aired,I had recorded it but it's on again tomorrow at 08:05

[Nick Armstrong]

Another gem from Talking Pictures

Malta Story

Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins et al and a marvellous score by William Alwyn.

...it's on again tomorrow at 08:05

Thanks Edgy - now set to record

[johncorrigan]

'Can You Ever Forgive Me?'...absolutely terrific entertainment. Great double act Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant and such a great tale brilliantly told.

[jayne lee wilson]

LOVE, SIMON....
Very individual, amusing and touching blackmailed-into-coming-out tale, high-school-social-media and family setting, great soundtrack (including The 1975..cool, dude! etc.); I guess many of us have even unhappier stories to tell around all this, but Nick Robinson's performance as Simon is very affecting....

CRAZY HEART
Jeff Bridges the perfect fit for a grizzled, past-his-peak but with a great back catalogue, alcoholic C&W man, playing smaller venues (and still pulling the Ladies in Stetsons); gets one more chance to make it big.....
Not much happens...it's just a great, laid-back, slow tempo road movie really. And great music (T-Bone Burnett etc). Which Bridges performs terrifically well.
Wonderful thing about movies like this is, I get to enjoy music I'd never usually choose to play. (q.v. Blues Brothers, Walk the Line etc).

THE LEISURE SEEKER
Another laid-back, slow tempo road movie (I'm a sucker for them..Kings of the Road, Radio On etc), this time about an elderly couple taking one last chance at indepedence on a trip from Massachusetts to Florida in a lovely '75 Winnebago Indian. Adventures on the way get more and more hazardous, as he (Donald Sutherland) is intermittently afflicted with Alzheimers-related memory loss & confusion, she (Helen Mirren) sick with some unspecified but serious (i.e. cancerous) condition, coping very uneasily with her husband's decline. Their long relationship gradually reveals its own afflictions through inadvertent and painful recollection. Doesn't pull its punches about the physical indignations age afflicts us with...

Got a fair bit of critical flak, but (perhaps coming off the back of "Jayne: The Caring Years") I found it very moving, gradually tightening its grip on your involvement with the two principals... (played very naturally by Sutherland and Mirren).

[Conchis]

I watched A Severed Head on Taking Pictures last night.

I'd never seen it before but a friend, who had read the Iris Murdoch source novel and seen the J B Priestley stage adaptation, had described it as 'pretentious guff.'

Well, he wasn't wrong. In fact, he was far too kind. 'Pretentious' doesn't even begin to cover it. 'Up its own rectum' might be nearer the mark.

The screenplay came courtesy of that bobbing literary popinjay 'Freddy' Raphael. Imdb tells me he was paid the eyebrow-twitching sum of £75,000 for his efforts. This reduced the budget for the rest of the film, so the producers had to go for 'cheaper' actors for the leads. This had the happy consequence of providing roles for Ian Holm, Lee Remick ,Richard Attenborough, Claire Bloom and (the lovely) Jennie Linden. Dick Clement (The Likely Lads) made his directorial debut after everyone else had turned it down.

Well, the acting is marvellous (Holm was superb in everything he ever did - he didn't need a good script to be brilliant) but oh, my paws and whiskers, the enterprise was sunk from the start by the source material/screenplay. A huge and terrible waste of talent.

[Conchis]

Before hitting the sack last night, I watch the first forty-five minutes of Villain (1971), an unintentionally hilarious film in which fruity British character actors attempt tp play East End gangsters. Richard Burton's cockney accent gave Dick van Dyke's a run for its money.

[Belgrove]

Adam McKay previously gave us The Big Short, a comedic take (sic) on the 2007 financial crash, and how some profited from it. He adopts a similar, sometimes surreal, approach in Vice, which charts the career of Dick Chaney from boozy slob to modern Machiaveli. Christian Bale put on the pounds rather than wear a fat suit to play the role, and one feels (and sees) his poor heart labouring under the strain of his doughnut and Chinese takeaway diet. His portrayal could have been a crude lampoon, but he gives a restrained performance of a ruthless but totally uncharismatic bureaucrat who grabs the levers of power without anyone seeming to notice. Your favourite baddies all feature in his career, Nixon, Rumsfeld, Bush Jnr, along with the occasional hero, Colin Powell. His relationship with his elder daughter gives some glimmer that Chaney has a heart, but even here, following his heart change he has a change of heart. It's a very funny and skilfully made film, unconventionally told, with terrific performances. Be sure to stick around until after the (elegant and witty) credits have rolled.

[vinteuil]

... Be sure to stick around until after the (elegant and witty) credits have rolled.

... absolutely! Half of the audience where we saw it left during the credits - missing the wit of the various fly-fishing flies, and even more the final scene.

We loved it. A film made with great joy, conveying such depressing insights into various truths behind American power.

.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yeterday I watched "The Knowledge" on a VHS tape I took from a broadcast of the 1979 TV movie and tongue-in cheek recruitment publiciser - a wonderful look at a group of disparate cockney types undertaking the well-known course to becoming a fully-fledged London cabbie, with a sadistic Nigel Hawthorne as the course inductioner and main tester brilliantly rehearsing the supercilious role to come a decade on in "Yes Minister", and several fresh faces also to become familiar in subsequent series.

Having now been living back in The Smoke for the past 15 years, I think I was able to spot all the locations.