... I've been watching a lot of sport with the European Championships coming to a climax and the grass court tennis season kicking off but ... I guess there hasn't been much on tv and I've been watching a lot of stuff I've seen before. I will though be getting to the cinema a lot more in the next couple of weeks (I'll see In Search of a Midnight Kiss this week and La Antena next weekend and maybe I Served The King of England if I can be bothered to drive to Warwick) so the blog's pace should quicken even with Wimbledon starting tomorrow (p.s. COME ON ANYTHING SLOVAKIAN!!!)

So I'll do a round up of some films I've seen just to keep things moving here even though they're not the most inspired bunch I've ever written about. I caught a couple of 80s films to do with space on television, but from very different perspectives. The first was Starman, which was a John Carpenter film about an alien (Jeff Bridges) who kidnaps a woman (Karen Allen) after taking the form of her dead husband to help him rendez-vous with his people otherwise he dies. It's a decent watch, but Bridges' oscar nomination is very perplexing - Allen is the best thing about this film, she imbues her character with such honest emotion and plays it completely straight, thus lending the movie a lot more credibility than it probably deserves. Nice enough film, but nothing spectacular, not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Keeping with the Americans in space theme, I saw The Right Stuff on TCM and ... boy is it long. It chronicles the development of the American space programme from test pilots breaking the sound barrier through to the "Mercury 7" group of men and their journies into space. The special effects are excellent, I'm not even sure if I need to qualify that with an "especially for the time", but it's additional praise so I'll throw it out there. The story though, well, there isn't really one, it just hops from one thing to another and there's no real smoothness to the narrative, you don't care for the characters, it's just "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" and there's no through-line between the events to make you care. That said it is well acted and has some impressive set pieces but ... screenplay issues abound.

In another twist there is actually another film that I saw for the first time recently that fits the Americans in Space theme and that is "the worst film of all time" - Plan 9 From Outer Space, which I watched solely because a/ I love the Tim Burton film Ed Wood which is about the director of this film and features recreations of it and b/ somewhere on the internet was hosting it. It's not the worst film of all time, but it's clearly not in any shape of form anything approaching a decent film let alone a good one. You can see shadows of boom mikes in the shot, parts of the set move, there are shocking and actually laughable moments of just incompetent filmmaking. But (and I LOVE that there's a but) the finale actually was not that stupid and the point and message was rather a good one so I cannot hate the film entirely because of that. At least it got me to watch Ed Wood again (albeit with the commentary on) and it made me appreciate him a lot more.

So finally, I caught about 45 minutes of Rushmore, why only 45 mins? Because I turned it off in a haze of apathy. Chortled twice and laughed out loud once, this is a film so in love with itself and so self regarding it's impossible to have any time for. Wes Anderson is a filmmaker I have no particular love for (nor his contemporaries Noah Baumbach and Alexander Payne, making precisely one very good film between them - Sideways) and this was the nail in the coffin. Not that it's a bad film, it's not, it's competently put together but it's nowhere near as funny, nor the music anywhere near as cool as Anderson clearly thinks it is. I'd heard praise for Bill Murray but sadly it's probably his most overrated performance in one of his more uninteresting films. Just not my thing at all.