Friday Five: BFF

The British Film Festival 2015 has been and gone. I wanted to see every film shown as part of the programme (with the exception of the family comedy one), but time constraints and other commitments meant that I couldn't. Some, such as Suffragette and The Program) are coming to the screens on general release, so I will catch them then. Here are the films that I did get to see:

5 Films I Saw at the British Film Festival:

1. Dare to Be Wild - A young Irish woman (Mary Reynolds played by Emma Greenwell) decides she want s to win the Chelsea Flower Show, so she does. Her garden is meant to celebrate wild places and Celtic mysticism, so there’s lots of soft lighting and swirly music. The story is supposedly true, although it’s full of one-dimensional characters and paint by numbers plotting, but what a glorious canvas: it looks beautiful but it’s a bit twee.
2. Queen of the Desert - When I was a child Gertrude Bell was my heroine, as I loved her independent spirit and her refusal to be bowed by convention. After watching this film directed by Werner Herzog with Nicole Kidman playing Gertrude, she still is. The story is completely simplified, Robert Pattinson is somewhat laughable as T.E. Lawrence, and the lack of protective eye-wear in the midst of sandstorms is shameful, but it’s still rather lovely. The sweeping scenery shots are rapturous, and Damian Lewis gets to play a bit-part.
3. Bill - Written by those responsible for Horrible Histories, this is a version of William Shakespeare’s lost years that appeals to all levels. The cast of six play all the roles with a dash of pantomime wit, and there are gags aplenty with a smattering of Shakespearean quotes thrown in for good measure. It’s no Shakespeare in Love but it’s funny enough without being original.
4. Elstree 1976 - If you were an extra in the original Star Wars film, would it change your life? Would you travel to all the conventions getting embroiled in the debate over whether you deserved to be there signing autographs or is that just for the ‘stars’? Would you rather be a recognisable face or wear a sweaty Storm Trooper helmet? How would you feel if your voice was dubbed throughout, or your scenes cut from the final edit? These questions and more are posed and answered in this unusual but intriguing documentary which interviews several actors connected with the cultural icon, and offers a nostalgic look at how sci-fi films used to be made.
5. Absolutely Anything - A light-hearted, reasonably entertaining comedy about a ‘random earthling’ (Simon Pegg) who is granted absolute power by the Intergalactic Council (animated figures voiced by the remaining Pythons). Of course he initially uses it for personal (and sexual) gratification, trying to get his beautiful neighbour (Kate Beckinsale) to fall in love with him. There’s nothing here you’ve not seen before (it’s similar to A Fish Called Wanda), but it features solid performances, clear direction, some clever scriptwriting, and Robin Williams as the voice of Dennis the dog in his final film, which is particularly affecting.

Friday Five: Beer Day Out

There were many brewers at Beer Day Out this year, and many beers to be drunk. the following are five of the ones I sampled.

5 Beers at Beer Day Out:

1. Threesome; Nomad Brewing Co./ Beavertown/ Birra Del Borgo - You would expect a collaboration beer between these three to produce something pretty special and you wouldn't be disappointed. UK malts (including Maris Otter) provide backbone for Aussie bush tucker - muntries (emu apples) and bush tomatoes - and it's rounded out by ageing for six months in grappa barrels. It tastes as intriguing as it sounds
2. Inappropriate Touching; Hawkers/ Edge/ Kaiju!/ Evil Twin/ Baird - Collaboration beer with smoked malt and some sweetness
3. Brett Porter; Bridge Road Brewers - It's sour and it's dark and it shouldn't work but it does - marvellous chocolate bitterness
4. The Vandal; Panhead Custom Ales - fresh, bitey, in-your-face Kiwi IPA
5. Blacktop Oat Stout; Panhead Custom Ales - dark and tasty with a roasty bitterness; a fine example

Friday Five: A Good Year for the Roses

We have roses in our garden. We didn't plant them, but still we reap the benefit of their perfumed blooms. Much has been written of roses: they are literal and metaphoric flowers. Here are five of my favourite quotes about roses:

5 Quotes about Roses:

1. 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' - Gertrude Stein
2. 'What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.' - William Shakespeare
3. 'The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.' - Rose Schneiderman
4. 'What though youth gave love and roses/ Age still leaves us friends and wine.' - Thomas Moore
5. 'For women are as roses, whose fair flower/ Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.' - William Shakespeare

Friday Five: Artistic Expression

I stumbled across an exhibition at Belconnen Arts Centre called Landscapes of Decay. It features work by artists from a collective called Random9. Working in a range of mediums, they use this exhibition to explore the influence of disintegration. The exhibition is curated by Liz Taggart-Speers, and the following statement is quoted in the catalogue:

"Disintegration is a subtle whispering, a barely realised theme of everything in life. It is as finely woven into the textures of humanity as birth, creation, war, sex and love." 

As our world continually decays, erodes and transforms, we have an artistic desire to capture the ephemeral nature of our existence. Despite the expression 'as old as the hills', landscapes are impermanent. Their living nature makes them vibrant and precious, and the ability to transform with time inspires these artists to attempt to capture their essence.

From the trees branching out of seats of learning in Dianne Libke's sculpture (the dictionary supporting the found wood are enclosed within a bell jar, preventing them from access to oxygen and carbon dioxide), to Camallie Guest's black and gold pigment wash and charcoal image of a peacock with feathers named for disasters caused by human intervention, the implications of the artwork are there for the viewer to interpret. I imagine that the latter with its colour scheme of the images painted for posterity onto Greek vases and the like juxtaposed with the stereotype of shrieking vanity suggests we should be ashamed of having caused such destruction to humanity and the environment.

Melinda Brouwer's ceramic boulders remind me of the peculiar rock formations in Tidbinbilla, or the Snowy Mountains. Her work investigates the changes caused in the environment by weather, seasons and the passage of time. Similarly, Naomi Somerville's cold-worked cast glass hints at melting polar ice and all the consequences that entails.

Meanwhile, although the word 'decay' has such negative connotations, Maria Klingner sees a more positive message in transformation and ageing, representing the ups and downs in the rhythms of a baby's heartbeat, captured in a piece of jewellery. She says she likes to examine 'the dynamic connection between adornment, creative expression, daily rituals and embedded memory'.

Five Pieces of Artwork from the Exhibition, Landscapes of Decay:

Memento Senescere... To Grow Old (2015) by Dianne Libke

Promenade of Failed Ideologies (2015) by Camallie Guest

Untitled (2015) by Naomi Somerville

In Utereo (2015) by Maria Klingner

Boulders (2015) by Melinda Brouwer

Friday Five: Birthday weekend

It's not a 'big' or a 'significant' birthday, but I believe in celebrating them anyway. Any excuse for a good meal and/or a get-together with friends should not be missed. Him Outdoors and I are both exhausted after a very busy couple of weeks and moving house. More than half of our belongings are still in boxes, and we might have spent the weekend sorting things out, but that didn't appeal, so...

Five Things I did for my Birthday Weekend:

1. A blind gin-tasting. It turns out that my favourite gins are the most expensive ones. Who'd have guessed that?
2. Breakfast at Rocksalt, Hawker - smashed avocado, whipped feta, and poached egg on rye toast, since you ask
3. Celebrate the christening of the child of friends - it's on the same day as my birthday and sharing the love in the arms of tradition and community makes me happy
4. A bike ride, sussing out our new location, past vineyards, rolling hills and the river gorge - and not a single magpie swoop
5. Invited a bunch of friends round to our new house for home-made pizza and drinks on the patio: houses need cats, conversation, company and laughter to make them complete

How can you be sure: The Invisible Gorilla

The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Harper
Pp. 242

If you were watching a basketball game on television and a person walked onto the court in a gorilla suit, you’d notice, wouldn’t you? Even if you were concentrating on counting the number of passes executed by one of the teams? Apparently not. In a now-famous survey conducted in 1999 by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, half of the subjects didn’t ‘see’ the gorilla, although 75% swore they would have seen it if it had been there. The fact that it was, and they didn’t, has led the two experimenters to investigate the human limits of concentration and assumption of knowledge and ability.

It’s not good news for anyone who talks on a mobile phone (hands free or otherwise) while driving. We only have a limited amount of attention, and if we split its focus, then we are not able to perform either task to full competence.

The book is subtitled ‘And other ways our intuition deceives us’, and these ways are many and varied. Generally we think we are smarter than we are, and the less ability we have, the more confidence we have in it. This illusion of confidence extends to others, as we are more likely to trust someone who expresses absolute certainty, than one who consults their colleagues and considers their opinion. 

This illusion of confidence ties in to the illusion of knowledge, by which we think we know more about a subject than we do. We understand many things on a superficial level, but not at greater depth, because we don’t have to. We may all think we know how a bicycle, a zipper or a toilet works, and this comprehension carries us through life quite adequately. But do we really know how such things operate? Try explaining it in detail and, unless you have had to fix one, you will probably soon come unstuck.

We are also under the illusion that technology is all-powerful. This is evident in examples of people blindly following sat-nav directions until they end up hundreds of miles from where they intended, or in the sea. “Technology can help us to overcome the limits on our abilities, but only if we recognise that any technological aid will have limits too. If we misunderstand the limits of the technology, these aids can actually make us less likely to notice what is around us.”

Part of this confidence trick is the use of ‘neurobabble’, in which scientific terminology is used to lend dubious theories the ring of authenticity. We have long been seduced by talk of the brain’s functioning power, and the myth that we only use 10% of its capacity is commanding. There is a widely-held belief that listening to Mozart makes us more intelligent, and although we like to think we could get smarter by doing nothing, there is no scientific basis for this illusion of potential.

And then there is the illusion of causality: people tend to find the link that suits them, even if there were other factors which have a more influential bearing on the incident, hence conspiracy theories. Because we can relate to the personal rather than the general, we are far more likely to believe an isolated anecdote from a person we know than banks of statistics.

The Invisible Gorilla suggests that we are constantly being duped – often by ourselves – and asks us to question our emotional responses. It’s not so much that everything we know is wrong, as that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do.

Friday Five: Mornington Peninsula Beaches

It's beautiful down here. Don't just take my word for it, though. Here are some beaches:

5 Fabulous Beaches on the Mornington Peninsula

Beach huts near Rye

Cape Schank

Sorrento

Fisherman's Beach

Point Nepean