Nearly, Nearly, Nearly...
Dec. 31st, 2020 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloIt doesn't seem that long ago that I looked at the calendar for 2020 and wondered what was going to fill up all those days that hadn't happened yet.
Still no snow here, but we do have frost. I wanted to photograph the cold moon at its setting but when I tried yesterday I found the battery on my camera had died and today, when I was thinking about it, the moon sank behind a cloud.
The BBC showed a number of relatively recent movies over Christmas and now- for a limited time- they're available on the i-player- and I'm picking off the ones that interest me: on Tuesday it was Dunkirk- and yesterday The Death of Stalin. The Death of Stalin is full of surprises. Who, for instance, would ever have guessed that a Western film maker would one day make a movie with "Nicky" Kruschev as it's lead character, or that Simon Russell Beale (turning in a tremendous performance as Lavrentiy Beria) would co-star in a movie alongside Steve Buscemi and Paul Whitehouse? The Death of Stalin is, I gather, about as true to the actual history as Shakespeare's Richard III, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I care about historical accuracy except when I don't- and you can't say fairer than that. Armando Iannucci has had a brilliant career all ways round but his emergence in his 50s as a risk-taking, world-class movie director is perhaps the biggest surprise of all.
Still no snow here, but we do have frost. I wanted to photograph the cold moon at its setting but when I tried yesterday I found the battery on my camera had died and today, when I was thinking about it, the moon sank behind a cloud.
The BBC showed a number of relatively recent movies over Christmas and now- for a limited time- they're available on the i-player- and I'm picking off the ones that interest me: on Tuesday it was Dunkirk- and yesterday The Death of Stalin. The Death of Stalin is full of surprises. Who, for instance, would ever have guessed that a Western film maker would one day make a movie with "Nicky" Kruschev as it's lead character, or that Simon Russell Beale (turning in a tremendous performance as Lavrentiy Beria) would co-star in a movie alongside Steve Buscemi and Paul Whitehouse? The Death of Stalin is, I gather, about as true to the actual history as Shakespeare's Richard III, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I care about historical accuracy except when I don't- and you can't say fairer than that. Armando Iannucci has had a brilliant career all ways round but his emergence in his 50s as a risk-taking, world-class movie director is perhaps the biggest surprise of all.
