‘The Day I was Birthed’
I spent most of today in the car.
That’s a different entry from before. It’s personal and emotional and reveals the fact that time away from watching these movies is time spent doing mundane things instead of being inspired.
This blog has become so much more than writing about the 100 or 200 greatest films ever made, as I experience them – morphing into a blog about how I tried to survive the experience as the film regime rose, again and again, to more than 400 films.
For the first few months it was definitely less emotional and more about setting a goal and achieving it. Now, it’s about adapting to the changes that I’ve had to submit to – given in to – and how I’m struggling week to week – often day to day – to achieve the new challenge.
The new challenge is to acknowledge that I have another life which doesn’t involve music and film and is about care, nurture, and anything that is bigger than the initial project.
Today I went to Chipping Norton to put my SONY camera, FDR-AX100E – 4k – in for repair. It fried or froze in Broken Hill during my NSW Outback adventure. The heat was blistering at 3pm and it exhausted me to walk from the car to the entrance of the building.
Phantom Thread 2017
Realizing that this was the last screening of Phantom Thread (2017) in Sydney at 1000 I went to bed at 0300 and got up at 0900. And I am so happy I did, as this film is one of the most unusual films I will ever have the privilege of seeing in a theatre. It is very deliberate and very methodical in the way that it unfolds, full of great beauty and kindness as well as despicable manipulation.
My initial reaction was an uncertain response, trying to determine whether it was good or really good, or brilliant.
That night, at A.J.’s Indian Restaurant in Eastwood, while my kids went to the loo, I had a ten-minute conversation with Alison about the extraordinary, incredible, astonishing, brilliant, creative, unexpected ways this film told its story. While being (deliberately and acceptably) short on story it was rich in detail and never flagged.
