the birds have less to say for themselves

Right now there's a war of nerves going on between me and the gigantic spider wwho has taken up residence at the top of my curtains... we had words, and he shuffled about 2 cm further away from my bed (and faced the other direction) but still. It's a really really big spider.

Ho hum.  Is my all-consuming arachnophobia showing much yet??

Now halfway through my London Film Festival blitz, which have certainly been an interesting variety thus far...
First up was The Light Thief.  From which we have gathered that Kyrgyzstan is... quite pretty, but probably not somewhere you'd want to live. As is starting to be a pattern, it's absolutely watchable, right up until the end when everything goes a little bit bonkers and stops making any kind of sense.  Mostly, there's an actual plot there (involving windmills!) but the script seems to keep forgetting what it's point was (apart from China = bad perhaps?). 

For the most part, it's got great scenery, it's sweet and funny and very human.  The nastiness that kicks off towards the end absolutely doesn't match that and makes for a very odd finish...

Which you could pretty much say something similar about Meek's Cutoff.  Actually, lots of it involved S and I reminiscing about the big trip we took.  Who knew, turns out migrating via covered wagon in 1845 is much less fun than taking a road trip in the same area a century and a half later...!

The Oregon desert felt very familiar, but hell, its not that interesting a place unfortunately - certainly not enough to bear the weight the director decides to place on cinematography over character development. Towards the end, the epithet Too Stupid To Live was the only thing going round in my brain. And Meek himself... gawd, he was terrifyingly similar to the crazy guy we shared a campfire with in Klamath, who never freaking stopped talking.

What did work was Michelle William's feisty settler wife who was the closest we were going to get to a protagonist... she has some fabulous moments (the standoff where, of course, she has the bigger gun dammit).  Could really have done with lots more about her and the relationship with her husband, who were both interesting people with a lick of sense about surviving in the desert - as opposed to the rest of their party, who honestly didn't seem to appreciate what they were heading into, or make any attempt to get their act together (why would you, when hysteria is so much more productive...). 

Mostly it inspired much frustration... I mean, I love films that deconstruct things like Westerns, but there's only so much you get from hanging around outside your characters guessing at where they're headed.  I wanted to be more involved, even if that meant bracing yourself for the inevitable cast cull toward the end - except, seriously??