RE: https://mastodon.social/@nicolasgouny/117059276164249450

#Caturday

Just watched Shelter, the latest Jason Statham film. Slow start but picks up. And noticed that one of the people he kills is a stuntman friend of mine. Just messaged him saying: “Just seen you getting killed by Statham!!”

#Movies #Films

#LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday

Vive le Cinema! - A segment of this film, to be honest, in which Jeanne Moreau interviews Orson Welles over dinner at the Ritz, Paris. It’s a joyful thing, watching Orson telling tall tales, including how he nearly killed himself aged six to get out of piano lessons, or when a film he was directing had no costumes so he filmed everyone in a sauna, then exploding into laughter like a little boy. Such an entertaining film. On Criterion Channel.

La Condition/The Arrangement - Swann Arlaud is a notaire who gets his maid pregnant. She and his wife form an alliance. Another great performance from Galatea Bellugi.

The Sacrifice - Big-screen 4K revival of Tarkovsky’s magnificent final film.

Private Life - Sub-Baumbach IVF dramedy that has a good performance from Kayli Carter.

#Films #Movies

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@dee/117049432464087949

This thread is one of the best things you’ll read today.

Great interview with the music-video director Tim Pope (The Cure, Talk Talk, Style Council, Bowie).

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/05/tim-pope-music-video-director-mtv-the-cure-bowie-queen-soft-cell-neil-young

#LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday

The Non-Actor - Interesting short that has great sound design, to convey a woman losing her hearing. Maya Hawke gets off with Victoria Pendretti, and the Letterboxd lesbians go loopy for it.

Ghost World - First-time watch. I know. I liked it. Thora Birch is great. I hope Enid lived a good life.

Blow Out - Classic De Palma thriller.

Kim Novak’s Vertigo - Seriously badly made doc. You’ve got Kim Novak chatting to you and *this* is what you come up with? Pur-lease.

#Films #Movies

Having looked at YouTube thumbnails, I realise I’m lacking in the way I write my toots. So to garner more engagement from here on in, I will change the way I couch things.

[Clears throat] I just DESTROYED my breakfast!

Thank you

Not really sure what an “emotional burger” is. 🙄 Anyway, I’m a freelance sub-editor and proofreader if anyone wants to hire me.

@CiaraNi Morning, pet! 😉

Lovely interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg about grief, memory, and photography. https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/17318/charlotte-gainsbourg-serge-exhibition-rencontres-arles-photography-jane-birkin?utm_source=AnOther%20newsletter%20–%20master%20list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AnOther%20Newsletter%20%2801KXR9JSSTQAJ1WVX1HEQM50ES%29&_kx=0k5wGY6R0V7aatb11DXG0XPXNyosRF54Nz3evieyjVE.YsDqRL

#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

All films this week are from Criterion Channel’s amazing Murderous Melodramas season.

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing - Genuinely great Joan Collins performance as a young actress fought over by a millionaire and a star architect. The story this film is based on is wild.

Niagara - Marilyn is so good in this tense murder flick set at the falls. Jean Peters became Mrs Howard Hughes. Goofy Max Showalter appears to be acting in a different film.

Desert Fury - Lizabeth Scott is at the centre of a storm in this very queer-coded thriller melodrama.

Violent Saturday - Victor Mature caught up in a bank heist! Lee Marvin as a bad motherfucker! Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer! You won’t see any of that in The Odyssey next week.

#Films #Movies

There’s a house and shop for sale in Auterives, near Toulouse, and, frankly, I’d buy it just so I could have this magnificent chest of drawers.

https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/properties-in-town-for-sale-in-france-30-minutes-south-of-Toulouse-in-the-historic-centre-of-Auterive---pb830562

Snappy URL, huh?

Those following our journey south in our sailboat, Scarlet, from the Uk to Portugal know that we've been at it a few years. 2 years ago we left Gosport and eventually reached Quiberon in Brittany before we were stopped by our starter motor catching fire(!). We did engine repairs and maintenance there and overwintered for a year until last summer when a somewhat delayed start due to ADHD diagnosis getting in the way saw us reach Bilbao, where we spent last winter.

This year, when the weather allowed, we started moving again. We have now reached Muros in Galicia.

We knew this section, getting round the Galician rias, was going to be a race against time. It's an indented coastline with no safe shallows with treacherous rocks everywhere. If you stick to deep water you avoid it.

But every summer some of the population of Iberian orcas that spend winter and spring around the Strait of Gibraltar migrate north to Biscay to follow bluefin Tuna. And the only way to reliably avoid them is to stay in water of less than 20m depth. This is impossible in Galicia.

Our time has run out. Orcas have now been spotted north of Lisboa. They have arrived. We are still 3 rias from the Portuguese border.

So now we may be stuck, or at least have to watch VERY carefully for a window to JUST BLOODY RUN.

I'm part of the "orcas.pt" fleet, which is a group of mostly hobbyist sailors banding together to share information and advice about the orca situation. The "official" recommendations are terrible to the point that experts mostly prefer to work with our group, and as a result we get pretty good intel on where they are (some of them have GPS trackers I believe, but that exact info is only shared with the group admin because we don't want people looking for these animals).

Here's the rub. Orcas swim (when they aren't chasing something) at up to 50km per day. We have a pretty good read on where the danger areas are. Last sighting, draw a 50km circle for each 24 hours. Are you in it? Be afraid.

Almost no attacks have ever happened west of the 10th line of longitude, but we can't reasonably go out there in Scarlet. She is a 9 metre marina hopper absolutely not equipped for deep ocean sailing. Some people do cross the Atlantic in boats like that but they're nutters.

Also she is a deep fin keel with a single spade rudder; it will take very little orca action to pull our rudder clean off at which point there is a hole below the waterline that the rudder stock exited through and ... well, the boat sinks.

Unfortunately smaller sailboats with spade rudders which are most at risk from sinking on the first hit are amongst their favourite playthings. Contrary to the popular "orcas are going after the billionaires" narrative, the boats they trend to take are likely worth less than your car if you have a half decently paying job. Big motor yachts tend to steer by thrust vectoring and don't do "floating thing go spinny when I smack the shit out of its tail fin". They can also quite possibly outrun them which we absolutely cannot.

And then you abandon to liferaft after, assuming they haven't taken out your electrics (the batteries are back there), doing the whole mayday mayday mayday please send a fucking helicopter, I think these marine sheep spawn are going to eat me, HELP! thing (we have a handheld radio as well and iPhones can send distress signals even without cell coverage).

So anyway there you are in your liferaft, watching a load of your stuff go to the seabed, all three of you (probably. We usually have 3), throwing up (because throwing up in a liferaft is what you do. They are profoundly unpleasant spaces to spend any time), which surrounded by playful teenage delinquent 6 tonne murderfish who you have heard are VERY picky eaters and will only eat bluefin tuna and maybe octopus and definitely not human, honest, but which aren't above violently tossing floating shit around into the air for the lulz to see if it makes more fun vomiting and screaming noises, hoping that you don't drift into the rocks on what is literally called the "Coast of Death" when you translate the name into English.

So we're gonna like, properly pay attention to the "orca forecast", as it were.

And if we aren't absolutely certain it's safe to run for Vigo as fast as we fucking can, we may be stuck in Muros until autumn.

Let's see. Worst case we get the boat hauled out onto the hard and re-antifoul her (disgustingly messy but strangely pleasurable job).

if the worst does happen, assuming your boat is still floating and controllable after the first hit, apparently the thing to do is disengage autopilot, start the engine if not already running, apply FULL throttle, and motor directly away from the pod (preferably towards shallow water) as fast as possible. They can swim faster than the boat can go, but remember, they're juveniles doing it for a laugh, and apparently if they wander off from the pod by more than about 300 metres their mothers yell at them to come back.

"Aw mum! I was sinking the thing!"

"You can sink the thing after you've eaten your dinner, now come HERE"

"Dinner is tuna again. It's always tuna. I'm BOOOOORED. Can I have beef?"

"What the fuck is beef?"

RE: https://masto.pt/@snowgaze/116821866435239794

@TheBreadmonkey

And I’ve just discovered that Turner Contemporary in Margate will be staging an exhibition of her work https://turnercontemporary.org/news/sophie-calle-at-turner-contemporary

Spare a thought by a friend of my wife’s here in London who is having the boiler replaced this week, which involves having to whack up the heating on all the radiators in his house to test it. He reports that his house is “cosy”. 🥵

RE: https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys/116759422606878412

This is obviously @TheBreadmonkey alt account

Listening to county cricket commentary and have just heard a phrase that, if you know nothing about the game, would sound utterly bizarre: “Dom Bess is bowling with two short legs.”

@CiaraNi Not that I expect you to know all Danish writers just because you’re Danish but do you know Helle Helle? I’m reading a novel she wrote called They, and it’s so good. I’d never heard of her but I bought it as a plus-one on Vinted, and I’m so glad I did.

This is amazing. What a lovely website. @TheBreadmonkey @Notesfromtheroad https://mastodon.art/@Notesfromtheroad/116726319287085962