weequizzie

Ghostbusters is one of the greatest films ever made. No debate.

via Retronaut and ShortList (full artist details on these sites).

And this, just because.

How Do I Know

Going to see New York at the Barbican.

“I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses. I’m interested in clothes.”

To watch this.

Surviving Life showing at the ICA

Here she comes, Queen of the Hipsters, swinging her lithe, kooky arms and talking about The Future, her follow-up to the critically acclaimed, hilarious and disturbing, Me, You and Everyone We Know.

On the surface this is a relationship movie, an ailing relationship, but at the hands of July we’re made to dig a little deeper. Her deft touch and abundant curiosity allows her to pull the individuals out of their togetherness, unhinging them so we can watch them founder.

Clambering against the downward sink Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt a sickly cat, the proverbial glue, that will bind them together and give their relationship a raison d’être, well, for six months at least as Paw Paw is a sickly puss. On arriving to scoop him up into loving arms they’re told they need to come back in 30 days to pick him up, they also discover that Paw Paw could live for five years. A discovery that cements the future into something that is already over. Sophie: “We’ll be 40 in five years.” Jason: “Forty is basically 50. And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.”

30 days.

30 days before responsibility kicks in and doors are slammed shut. A finite time to make something happen. So, it’s a talking cat who acts as the catalyst, creating the momentum that pushes the couple into action. They quit their jobs, turn the internet off and wait for something to happen.

Sophie looks out and screams. Unable to generate the momentum to choreograph her dance (“30 dances, 30 days”), she succumbs to her desire to be watched. Looking out she finds a creepy gold-chained man who promises to watch her always and she slips back into inaction, she doesn’t even have to try. Stealing away from her own life Sophie moves in with him and is watched until a part of herself comes back to reclaim her, a creeping yellow shirt, that she eventually climbs inside, reborn, dancing, she makes peace with herself.

Jason looks out and saves trees. Turning to something other than himself he sells trees door to door, knowing that it may be futile but there’s nobility in that. He meets a potty mouthed poetry making old man through the Pennysaver who tells him that relationships are tough and that this is only the middle of the beginning, and that’s the hardest part. Later when Sophie begins to speak of her infidelity Jason stops time, holding them both in their studio apartment at 03.14. The old man appears again, this time as the moon but he doesn’t offer advice – “I don’t know anything, I’m just a rock in the sky” – he doesn’t allay Jason’s fears of being alone and only invites him to create his own action, bringing the future to bear.

All the while Paw Paw waits but it’s only so long before he’s extinguished, put out by his future owners inability to look beyond themselves. They each go to take him home and each discover they let him die.

The message, for me, is don’t give up.

Don’t give up. Don’t stop trying. Don’t think your life will change if you just wait silently, clinging on to the internet, waiting to be picked up by some invisible hand and deposited where you think you should be. Stop assuming there’s something better around the corner. Make changes. Be creative. Feel satisfied. Be grateful. Stop stopping yourself. Propel yourself in the future.

One other thing – Miranda July – what a legend, full of joy and curiosity. She has the ability to unsettle by shifting between humour and sadness, allowing the fears to rise up and be considered in unexpected ways and all she asks is for us to be curious, to look to the future, spread our arms open and prepare for amazing things to happen.

Olympia Le-Tan x Spike Jonze = this very beautiful tale via Nowness. Seriously, I would do awful things for one of her clutches. Terrible things.

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

Really want to see this.

Febrile, humming and buzzing with the end of the world. Before I saw ‘Melancholia’ it conjured up a Raymond Carver story written on acid and my imagining was pretty close to the mark.

There are dropped stitches and bits that won’t stick but damn it feels good. The deft unreal touch it’s fingered with left me vibrating, teeth chattering like a clammy handed movie going crack whore. I felt sick. Outside I jumped up and down and laughed a nervous laugh and caught my breath. The film is anchored, lurking and present, in the absence of anything apart from one event – the event to end all events.

Sublime and unhinged and with women, it’s about the women – the depressed, the put upon, the loved and without real love (whatever that is) – both rung out. The ouvert tying together of opposites, the sisters and the themes both are imbued with, is hackneyed but it worked. A blue planet mounting the earth didn’t rankle as I thought it might. I was ready to hate it, to wipe the conceit and excess from my lips, waiting for the expectant ire to unwind but instead it was sucked in to the quenching absence of everything.

It’s the glory of the mundane straddled on the unreal. The hyperreal. There’s not much to tell. It’s a futile story about a futile end.

“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realised everything had.” Raymond Carver said that.