Hooray for Easterwood!

So that's Easter over and done with - back to the Arvo Job tomorrow. In between running around (while I still can), writing (got much done today and yesterday, though I do keep painting myself into a corner with the dragon story. It's the prophecies, you see - they're a bugger to work with, especially if you're actually wanting to mess with the whole idea of prophecies) and reading Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, I caught up with a few movies I've been wanting to see for a while or just randomly picked because they looked like fun, watching them either here at home, or on Good Friday along with hot cross buns loaded with melting butter at my brother's home cinema in his Victorian-Viking-Steampunk (Vicvikpunk?) pile a few towns over.

The was The Master ( there are some people so damaged that not even cults can reel them in), Anonymous ( which I enjoyed, although if I were feeling sensitive about all the conspiracy theories surrounding poor Will S, I'd say some rather elitist people have a problem acknowledging that genius doesn't always have to spring from noble loins) and Robot and Frank (aaah, so bittersweet, and it had twists). Robot and Frank pushes all our we-desperately-want-to-love-our-automaton-pal buttons, and yet it does not cheat and make Robot anything but a robot.

In the foreign language department, there was the German post-apocalyptic (evil solar flares cruelly toast our poor planet) movie Hell (which means brightness in German, but very fittingly doubles as a place of eternal damnation in English.) This movie shows what you can do with hungry-looking actors, a burnt forest as a setting, filters on your camera lenses and just a handful of Euros. It's good but grim. Like with The Road, you wonder if you would have what it takes to bother slogging day after day through such misery and meanness. Finally, Luc Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is a very Gallic and cartoonish 103 minutes of fun a la Raiders of the Lost Ark with a feisty, very French, Victorian-era heroine on a mission to save her sister no matter what it takes. There are cool, talking mummies, there's a pterodactyl, there's a guillotine scene - say no more.

It was a nice mix of movies. Aaah, holidays are good.