Lost in London

Museum of London

Wandering through the city, looking for both my mind and my lawless heart, I suddenly stood in front of the Museum of London. I guess it was about time to strike something from my to-see list again.

This museum is worth a visit (free entry) if you are interested in the history of London. Even with my currently extremely short attention span I managed to pick up a few interesting things:

In 1016 Great Brittain had a Danish king (King Knut)
In 1689 Great Brittain had a Dutch King (William of Orange), and the Dutch financiers helped London to become a financial centre.
Sometimes history is fun.

The highlight for Davy was the fact that they had Nelson’s sword on display. Pretty cool.

After that I striked a cinema of my list, the Barbican. Or it’s much more than a cinema, it’s a theatre, art, music, dance, film and education centre. It’s location is a bit weird hidden between grey office buildings in East London, but their program is interesting. The cinema was quite alright, good chairs and tickets for reasonable prices.
Since the London Film Festival is still going strong I spent the most of my Sunday in the dark. It’s the 50th London Film festival, which meant that there was a surprise screening tonight at 50 different places in London. A lot of those places were cinemas in and around town, but there were also some more unusual places on the list: Heathrow Terminal 4, Holloway Prison, a living room in London and a hospital. I knew which film I was desperately hoping for to show up as the surprise film, but unfortunately I wasn’t that lucky. I’ll catch it in New York in December in stead.

Here are this weekend’s films:
A Prairie Home Companion (2006) (5/10)
This was the surprise film. I’m sure this is a great film, if you live in the US, and know the Prairie Home companion radio show. I didn’t know it and have no idea what the film is about, nor what it wants. Kevin Kline is hilarious (hope to see him soon again) but that was about the only highlight of the film for me. It has a great cast, but it wasn’t enough. It was boring.

A Good Year (2006) (6/10)
All I wanted was a decent romantic comedy. I had my doubts about Russell Crowe pulling that off, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Which was a mistake. Russell Crowe is not funny, and he doesn’t belong in a rom-com.The only reason why this film didn’t totally drown in, uhm, wine is the English cast. Tom Hollander. Albert Finney and Freddie Highmore do a good job. And filming partly in London always gets some bonus points. Russell was completely miscasted, Hugh Grant would have been a better idea.

Red Road (2006) (7/10)
Danish/UK (Zentropa) cooperation on this Cannes Jury prize winning British film. A powerful story with some pretty strong scenes. Generally I liked it, it’s another real character driven drama, with some strong performances.
But. It was way too slow in the beginning.

Not really a yahoo list no.

The biggest problem I have now is that it is 01:26 am, I should be asleep by now, but I need to deliver a premise and a 1 page outline of my short tomorrow. I have 3 stories, and not one of them has an ending I am satisfied with. Why exactly was I doing all of this?