La Belle Personne

 La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person), Christophe Honore, 2008

I too would find it difficult to concentrate if this guy was my high school teacher

Another beautiful film from French director Christophe Honore.

I love the little moments in his films where something is [partly] shown on screen - a written note, an inaudible whisper - and remains unexplained and intangible to the audience. I guess some viewers would find these inclusions insubstantial and superfluous to the narrative, but it gives an extra sense of realism to the film. Not all truths are fully disclosed in real life as they usually are on film.

Lea Seydoux and Louis Garrel are perfectly cast, and the classroom scenes and the quiet shots of bored French teenagers at school are rather beautiful.


Best consumed on a rainy, winters day.

Whirring and clicking.

I've spent the past two months going through hundreds of photographic slides that belonged to my grandfather.

It reminds me of special slide nights back in the 90s where a couple dozen family members were crammed into a small lounge room on a balmy summer's night to watch the latest photographic offerings of our enthusiastic grandfather.

We would gather and eat curry for dinner, and then the lights would go off and we'd settle down for hours to witness the show, all whilst listening to the whirring, and the clicking, whirring, and clicking, of the slide projector doing its rounds.

Digital slideshows - you have no comparison.

Margot, Margot.

Source unknown

quote from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Wes Anderson

Great film. Great quote. Great wall.

Sometimes murder can smell like honeysuckle..

Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944

Surely the best film noir ever made, Double Indemnity is – if I daresay myself – a masterpiece of the genre.

 Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck 

You want a cold-hearted femme fatale, you’ve got it; an audaciously likeable man falling for the nasty temptress; dimly lit lounge rooms filled with cigarette smoke and the stretching shadows from the Californian sun outside the venetian blinds; a plot involving desire, murder and insurance fraud for the sake of a seductive (and very well dressed and made-up) woman – it’s all there for you in Double Indemnity.

And with a director like Billy Wilder who co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler (from a story by James M. Cain), there was no way the film could ever fail.

Stanwyck, MacMurray and Edward G. Robertson in the best shot of the film

So many film noir conventions are utilised by Billy Wilder in the film – the character types, low-key lighting, voice-over narration and of course the plot themes – and Double Indemnity was a perfect introductory film into the genre when I first saw it at uni 4 years ago.

I bought the DVD last week and had so much pleasure watching this classic crime drama again.

The sets! The costumes! The music! The era when people didn't know that smoking was killing them!

That last mouthful...

That last mouthful of a crisp beer on a warm summer evening.

James Squire 'Four Wives' Pilsener 

Silence breakers.

Some highlight reads from the past year, and a few classics to cross off the 'Books I really should read if I ever get around to it' list that everybody seems to have.
A bonus of this accomplishment is that I now have a few more books to talk about should I ever get into one of those really painful conversations with awkward, stretching silences with a new acquaintance who doesn't warm to verbal communication. In situations such as these a violent dose of verbal diarrhea on a subject that your acquaintance has little, or indeed zero interest in always seems the best solution.

The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger

1984 George Orwell

The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John le Carre

Frankenstein Mary Shelley

A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway

Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy

Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'll start with a list.

The Seventh Seal (1957) Ingmar Bergman

Filmmakers I discovered (and much enjoyed) in the year that was 2012:


- Michelangelo Antonioni

 l'Avventura (1960) Michelangelo Antonioni

- Ingmar Bergman

- Yasujiro Ozu

- Wong Kar-Wai

In The Mood for Love (2000) Wong Kar-Wai

- Christophe Honore

- Michael Haneke

- Steve McQueen

Shame (2012) Steve McQueen

Could a year possibly get any richer? I will get back to you in 11.5 months.