Friday 19 August 2011

Back To Immigration Today,

we had to pick up Diana's passport, and also renew our multiple entry visa's for another year, that done home and watch a few DVD's, but first we caught up with some Bargain Hunt shows we had downloaded, then an old favorite comedian of mine starring in a DVD, the best of Frankie Howerd was the man himself, I am not sure if his fame/act ever left the UK but he was either hugely popular or totally ignored, despite the fact that he suffered from acute shyness, he was drawn to drama but during his career he would fall prone to serious bouts of depression, culminating in his suffering a nervous breakdown in the early 1960s, happily, Frankie was not destined to die in obscurity, right at the end of his life, he was “rediscovered”, and promptly became extremely popular with a whole new generation of student audiences, who sported T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Frankie Says”…and “Titter Ye Not" a great and sadly missed comedian,

then a compete change of pace, the story of Confucius, his teachings, followers and his life, in this film directed by Hu Mei she graduated from the Directors' class of the 1982 Beijing Film Academy, this being her first major film, the story is a little complicated at first with 3 different families and the fact that each age as the story continues, but beautifully filmed, a pleasure to watch, just one small point there is no English sound track, Chinese dialog with English subtitles, but this does not detract from the film,

having read the book I was looking forward to watching the DVD, South, I was not disappointed, of course shot in the 1914 the film is grainy and with out sound, but what heroes all concerned were, there was so much footage I had never seen before, also newly found footage of the Ross Sea expedition to lay stores at 60 mile intervals across the ice cap for Sir Ernest to make use of, totally unique, to round off the evening a couple of episodes from Traffic Cops, a UK fly on the wall, or in the car police series, then for us off to bed.

No comments: