Time well spent

It's mostly been a lazy weekend round Connolly Towers. The last few weeks have been a bit hectic between work stuff and house stuff so it's been good to have a bit of down time for a change. I went for a few long walks in the park this weekend in anticipation of my long awaited return to jogging. That'll probably be Tuesday morning so I expect to be limping heavily by Tuesday night. Other than that, I spent yesterday in town (lunch in the Stag's Head - the best value toasty in Dublin) and watched far too much bad tv last night. When I wasn't busy doing nothing I managed to catch a couple of films - 2 Days in Paris and Atonement.

2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy's exercise in over-achievement (she wrote, stars, directed, produced and wrote the score), is well worth a look. She's a photographer visiting Paris with her American boyfriend en route to New York. Over the course of the 2 days they meet her parents (Delpy's real-life parents, of course), argue, have sex, talk about sex, bump into several of her ex-boyfriends, insult taxi drivers, visit Jim Morrison's grave, go to galleries and parties and, eventually, break up. It works best in the first hour when her boyfriend, Adam Goldberg, has to deal with her suspicious parents, her openly lusty exes, and the rising paranoia that he's just another boyfriend who'll be replaced and forgotten at a moment's notice. As he says himself: "the least romantic day in the history of Paris". Sure, it's treading similar ground to Before Sunset and it owes more than a little to Annie Hall and Manhattan (at various points in the film, Julie Delpy resembles both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton) but it's got buckets of charm, wit and insight. Well, perhaps not buckets of insight. Ultimately, it loses its way a little bit as the film moves into the final third and the relationship becomes more fraught, but there's more than enough in it to justify 90 minutes of anyone's time.

Here's the trailer


Atonement is fantastic. A bit like The Bourne Ultimatum, which I saw last week, there's really not much more I can add to all the great reviews it's been getting. But apart from all the love and tragedy there's a fantastic 5 or 6 minute sequence when James McEvoy gets to Dunkirk that has to be seen to be believed. It's a continuous tracking shot as he walks along the beach surrounded by hundreds of extras brawling, singing and vomiting all around him. I don't know how the director managed it and it was probably digitally assisted but God, it was impressive. As was the whole film. And yes, there were tears at the end!