Tags: film review, Glasgow
Date: 19 February 2007 19:26:33
HD was here for the weekend (hooray!) and on Saturday we went up to town to the cinema. Currently we are in the middle of the Glasgow Film Festival, and on Saturday there was a Romanian film on which I wanted to see, so I made an executive decision and bought us both tickets. The film was called "A fost sau n-a fost?", which despite meaning "Was it or wasn't it?" has been inexplicably translated for international audiences as "12:08 East of Bucharest". That title does make sense - as 12:08 was the time that the Ceausescus left the Palace of the People by helicopter - but I can't see why the title couldn't have just been directly translated. I really enjoyed it - we laughed a lot. I do like Romanian black humour - I also want to see "The Death of Mr Lazarescu" which is another recently produced award-winning Romanian comedy (I did think about ordering the DVD and charging it to my department for essential background information, but I doubt they'd go for it). The film's call-in talk show on the little local TV station, discussing whether the events of 1989 had been a revolution or not (hence the original title) reminded me a lot of programmes I've seen in Romania and heard on the local radio stations, and the whole thing, despite showing Romania as rather drab and dreary, made me look forward to going out there later this year (even though of course I shall miss HD and home terribly). I was particularly pleased that, although I wasn't able to completely manage without the subtitles, I did notice a few times where the subtitles didn't say what the actors actually said. So I'm clearly not completely hopeless.
Unfortunately, at the end they then showed a 10 minute short film which was horrible (the overall overheard conversation in the lobby afterwards seemed to confirm that mine wasn't a minority view). It basically was about two guys walking home from a party finding a guy in an underpass who'd been stabbed. It wasn't especially gory, but I closed my eyes lots. It's funny, when I was a nurse blood didn't particularly bother me all that much (although I should say that I didn't work in massively bloody areas), but whenever I see it in films, even though I know they're only actors and that red stuff is only tomato ketchup, it really makes me want to grimace and not look. Yuck.
On the way to the bus stop after the cinema we encountered Glasgow On Saturday Night. I do love it here, but there's something about Saturday night in the city centre which I really don't like. I didn't feel threatened or scared (despite the blue flashing lights and the police running into Central Station over the road from the bus stop) - more that it's just a different planet from any other time of the day/week. There were two or three ridiculously large limousines (nedmobiles) zooming past with drunken hen parties inside, and lots of women wearing hardly anything staggering along the road. I think I'm getting old in my old age.